Pivoting as an Adaptive Strategy to Geopolitical Tensions in U.S. Science

TL;DR

This study examines how U.S. scientists adapt their research focus in response to U.S.-China geopolitical tensions, revealing adaptive strategies that are unevenly effective across different groups and fields.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on scientists' adaptive pivoting strategies under geopolitical pressures, highlighting disparities based on risk domains, ethnicity, and career stage.

Findings

Pivoting partially mitigates funding losses.

High-risk and early-career scientists benefit less from pivoting.

Geopolitical tensions influence research focus shifts.

Abstract

Geopolitical tensions increasingly reshape the structure and openness of global science, yet we still lack a clear understanding of how successfully scientists adapt their work under such pressures. Using millions of funding and publication datasets across the past ten years, we investigate how U.S. China geopolitical tensions reshaped individual research activities of U.S. based scientists, particularly those collaborating with Chinese peers. We find that although U.S. China geopolitical tensions significantly reduce funding opportunities, many scientists actively respond by pivoting their research portfolios toward alternative topics, and this adaptive reorientation partially mitigates funding losses. Crucially, the effectiveness of this adaptive strategy is highly unequal: for scientists in high risk domains, those of Asian descent, and early-career scientists, pivoting offers only limited protection against funding loss. Our results demonstrate that geopolitical tensions reshape science through shifts in scientists' strategic decisions about their research focus. Understanding this adaptive but uneven reconfiguration is essential for science policies to strengthen the resilience and inclusiveness of the scientific enterprise.