Broad or Narrow Focus? Posted on March 19, 2007 Stephen Hinshaw (bio) advises early career scientists to have a broad, multi-disciplinary understanding of their research area.

I think a big tension in the field, we talk about it with our graduate students, junior faculty get this advice: how broad should I be and how narrow should I be? And a lot of rewards in academic life are for the quote systematic program of research. Which sometimes gets translated into know a heck of a lot about a really narrow and not very interesting topic. I do not like that approach.

I do believe that someone needs to be systematic and explore carefully mechanisms, processes, clinical phenomena, elements of treatment, to be very thorough. But one can be very, very thorough and on the head of a pin. With the phenomena of interest, mental disorders, generating empirically supported treatments, knowing about the causal factors that predict and maintain these conditions, the advances are going to be made by people who can maintain a straight and narrow focus but also diverge through team members, through collaborations, though graduate students, because it's sometimes serendipitous findings or it’s linking that literature I read a few years ago but that cognitive or emotional or neural or family process may relate to a finding I had in ways that I hadn't thought of till now. So it's convergence and programmaticness along with divergence and creativity. When you can put the two together it really makes it fun and exciting and that's what the advances are going to come.

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