PhD students' taste for risk mirrors their supervisors'

"A researchers' propensity for risky projects is passed down to their doctoral students - and stays with trainees after they leave the laboratory, according to an analysis of thousands of current and former PhD students and their mentors."

""We often focus on thinking about how we can change the funding systems to make it more likely for people to take risks, but that's not the only lever we have," says Chiara Franzoni, an economist at the Polytechnic University of Milan in Italy. This study is "refreshing" because "we've discussed policy interventions a lot, but we haven't discussed training", she adds."

"They received responses to a survey designed to measure risk-taking from 1,223 PhD students enrolled in medical science programmes at seven universities in Sweden. Participants were asked, for example, to report how likely they were to take part in a safe project - defined as one that would guarantee publication in a mid-ranking journal - compared with a risky project, which was less likely to succeed but more likely to end up in a high-ranking publication."

Mentors' propensity for risky projects transfers to their doctoral students and persists after trainees leave the laboratory. Researchers measured risk-taking preferences using responses from 1,223 medical PhD students at seven Swedish universities by asking how likely participants were to choose safe projects that would likely guarantee mid-ranking journal publication versus riskier projects with lower success probability but higher chance of high-ranking publication. Publication histories of students and supervisors were examined and publication outcomes were used to estimate project risk. The findings identify doctoral supervision and training practices as important levers, alongside funding reforms, for shaping scientific risk-taking behavior.

Read at Nature