Executive Summary
This paper addresses the workforce that neglect studies will require to function as a mature field. The premise is that institutional infrastructure (Paper 3), funding (Paper 4), and data resources (Paper 5) are necessary conditions for the field but not sufficient ones; the work must be done by scholars whose training, career incentives, and professional networks make sustained engagement with the field possible. Building that workforce is a longer-term project than the other infrastructure work, since the training cycles measure in years rather than months and the career structures take a decade or more to mature.
The paper develops six arguments. The first is that the skill profile of a neglect-studies scholar is unusually demanding, combining substantive grounding in at least one host discipline with methodological breadth across the domains identified in Paper 2 and with the capacity to engage with research-governing institutions. The second is that the career risk profile of work on neglected questions is substantial and that the field’s workforce strategy must include explicit mechanisms for protecting early-career scholars from the professional costs that the work otherwise imposes. The third is that the field requires multiple training pathways — doctoral, master’s, continuing-education, and informal — each serving different constituencies and producing different scholarly contributions. The fourth is that mentorship structures must be designed deliberately, since the natural mentorship pathways within established disciplines do not adequately serve scholars whose work crosses disciplinary boundaries. The fifth is that the inclusion of practitioners and lived-experience contributors is intrinsic to the field’s mission rather than incidental to it, and that the workforce strategy must accordingly include structures that allow these contributors to participate as full members of the scholarly community. The sixth is that the field’s professional credentialing decisions — whether to develop formal certification, what professional association structure to build, how to define professional standards — must be made carefully and with attention to the trade-offs between consolidation and inclusiveness.
The paper concludes with a discussion of the timeline for workforce development and the specific risks the field must anticipate as the workforce matures.
1. Introduction
The institutional infrastructure outlined in the preceding papers requires people to build, sustain, and use it. The data dashboard requires scholars who can adapt bibliometric tools for neglect-mapping purposes; the registry requires editors who can evaluate evidence-tier claims; the journal requires reviewers who can assess submissions across multiple methodological domains; the abandoned-programs archive requires historians who can conduct recovery work; the funding strategy requires scholars who can engage credibly with foundation program officers and agency program staff. None of this can be done by scholars trained in conventional disciplines alone, since the field’s work routinely combines methods and substantive concerns that no single disciplinary training prepares scholars for.
The workforce problem is also the slowest of the field’s founding challenges to address. Buildings can be opened in a year; journals can be launched in two; dashboards can be developed in three. Doctoral training operates on five-to-seven-year cycles, and the scholars who emerge from those cycles need an additional decade to establish themselves as senior figures in the field. The implication is that workforce planning must begin at the field’s founding and must be sustained through the long period before its results become visible.
The argument of this paper is that the workforce strategy must address four interlocking questions. The first is what kinds of scholars the field needs and what their training should look like. The second is how the career risks of work on neglected questions can be managed, since those risks are real and the field cannot ask scholars to accept them without offering structural protections. The third is how the field’s scholarly community should be constituted, with explicit attention to who counts as a member and how the boundaries are drawn. The fourth is what professional infrastructure — associations, credentialing, standards — the field should develop and on what timeline.
The questions are interrelated, and the paper takes them up in turn while attending to the connections among them.
2. The Skill Profile
A neglect-studies scholar working at the standard the field requires must combine three kinds of capacity, each of which is demanding in its own right and the combination of which is more demanding than any one.
The first is substantive grounding in at least one host discipline. The argument is straightforward: claims that a particular question or area is neglected within a discipline depend on knowing the discipline well enough to assess what counts as established work, what the active research community considers central, and what the substantive merits of particular questions are. A scholar without serious disciplinary training cannot make such assessments credibly, and the field’s reputation depends on its scholars being credible to the disciplines whose attention patterns they study.
The grounding required is genuine rather than nominal. A neglect-studies scholar working on biomedical research portfolios must understand biomedical research well enough to engage with biomedical researchers as a colleague rather than as an outside observer. A scholar working on attention patterns in historical scholarship must know enough history to read the relevant literature with full comprehension. The standard is that the scholar’s substantive training would have allowed them to pursue a conventional career in the host discipline, with the neglect-studies work being an additional layer built on that foundation rather than a substitute for it.
The second is methodological breadth across the domains of Paper 2. The triangulation standard the field requires depends on scholars being able to read and assess findings from multiple methodological domains, and to integrate those findings into coherent conclusions. No single scholar will produce primary work in all six of the methodological domains identified in Paper 2, but every scholar should be competent to evaluate work in all of them. The competence must be deep enough to allow critical engagement rather than mere acquaintance: a scholar who cannot identify the limitations of a bibliometric analysis cannot use it appropriately, and a scholar who cannot recognize the methodological choices in an oral-history project cannot integrate its findings with other evidence.
The methodological breadth is unusual among scholars trained in established disciplines, which typically emphasize depth in a smaller range of methods. The implication is that the field’s training programs must include substantial methodological breadth as a core requirement, even though the requirement extends the time-to-completion of doctoral programs and increases the demands on students.
The third is the capacity for engagement with research-governing institutions. The field’s applied dimension (Paper 7 will develop this further) means that its scholars must be able to translate scholarly findings into terms that funders, learned societies, and policy bodies can use, and must be able to engage with those bodies in their own working modes. The capacity is partly methodological — knowing how to produce briefings, how to participate in advisory processes, how to navigate the political and institutional considerations that shape policy decisions — and partly dispositional, in the sense that it requires scholars who are willing to do the engagement work rather than treating it as secondary to publication in journals.
Not every neglect-studies scholar will engage with research-governing institutions at the same intensity, and the field has room for scholars whose work is more purely scholarly as well as for scholars whose work is more applied. But the field as a whole must include scholars in both modes, and the training programs should produce graduates who are at least equipped to engage when their work calls for it.
A specific consequence of the skill profile is that neglect-studies training is unusually long compared to training in single-discipline fields. A doctoral student combining substantive grounding in a host discipline with methodological breadth across the field’s domains and with applied capacity will typically require seven to eight years of training, compared to five to six in conventional single-discipline doctorates. The longer training has costs — to the students, to the institutions, and to the field’s growth rate — but the field cannot relax the requirement without compromising the standards on which its credibility depends.
3. Managing Career Risk
The career risks of work on neglected questions are substantial and well documented. Scholars who pursue questions outside their discipline’s center of gravity face slower publication, weaker citation accumulation, reduced grant success, and longer paths to tenure and promotion compared to scholars working on established questions. The risks are not evenly distributed: they fall more heavily on early-career scholars, on scholars at institutions without strong interdisciplinary support, and on scholars whose work crosses the political or methodological commitments of their host disciplines. The field cannot ask scholars to accept these risks without offering structural protections, and the workforce strategy must accordingly include explicit mechanisms for risk management.
Four kinds of protection deserve specific attention.
3.1 Institutional Commitments
The founding centers identified in Paper 3 should make explicit institutional commitments to the field’s early-career scholars, in the form of tenure-track positions or comparable appointments, multi-year fellowships that provide stable funding through the early-career period, and protected time for the methodological and substantive work that the standard career incentives do not adequately reward. The commitments require resources, which the funding strategy of Paper 4 must support, and they require institutional decisions that establish the field’s positions as genuinely permanent rather than as experimental appointments that can be reversed if priorities shift.
The institutional commitments should include explicit consideration of how the field’s scholars are evaluated for tenure and promotion. The standard criteria — publication in high-impact journals, citation accumulation, grant success — work poorly for scholars whose work is published in newly established outlets, whose citations accumulate more slowly because the field is small, and whose grant success is constrained by the funding mechanisms discussed in Paper 4. The evaluation criteria should be adapted to recognize the kinds of contributions the field’s scholars make, with the adaptation documented explicitly so that scholars can plan their careers around the criteria they will actually be evaluated against. The adaptation is not a special favor to the field; it is a recognition that standard criteria do not measure the contributions of scholars in emerging interdisciplinary fields accurately, and the adaptation has been made for many comparable cases.
3.2 Joint Appointments
Joint appointments between a neglect-studies center and a department in the scholar’s host discipline provide both institutional stability and methodological-substantive integration. The joint appointment allows the scholar to maintain disciplinary connections that support their substantive grounding, to publish in disciplinary outlets that support their tenure case, and to teach within disciplinary programs that maintain their teaching obligations in familiar territory. The structure has been used successfully in adjacent interdisciplinary fields and is well understood by university administrations.
The joint appointment requires careful design. The proportion of the appointment in each unit affects the scholar’s obligations and the units’ expectations, and the proportion should be set with attention to the realities of the scholar’s work rather than to administrative convenience. The tenure case must be reviewed by both units, which requires that the units’ evaluation criteria be compatible and that the scholar’s portfolio satisfies both. The teaching obligations must be distributed sensibly, with the scholar contributing to courses in both units rather than being asked to teach the full load of either. None of these design considerations is unique to neglect studies, and the established practices in adjacent fields provide reasonable models.
3.3 Cross-Institutional Mentorship Networks
Mentorship for neglect-studies scholars must come partly from outside their home institution, because the relevant senior scholars are typically scattered across institutions during the field’s early years. The founding centers should establish explicit cross-institutional mentorship networks, with senior scholars at each center serving as mentors for early-career scholars at other centers and at institutions without dedicated centers. The mentorship should include both substantive guidance on the scholar’s research program and structural guidance on navigating the career challenges specific to the field.
The mentorship networks should be funded explicitly, with travel support for in-person meetings, communication infrastructure for ongoing contact, and recognition of the mentorship work in the senior scholars’ own evaluations. The funding is modest compared to other elements of the field’s infrastructure, but the mentorship work is often unfunded and unrewarded in established disciplines, which limits how much of it can reasonably be expected from senior scholars whose other obligations are substantial.
3.4 Protected Publication Pathways
The flagship journal and companion outlets identified in Paper 3 provide publication pathways that established disciplines do not provide for neglect-studies work. The pathways protect early-career scholars from one of the most direct career costs of working on neglected questions — the difficulty of publishing in outlets that count toward tenure — but the protection works only if the field’s outlets are recognized by the scholars’ institutions and host disciplines as appropriate venues for the work.
The recognition requires deliberate effort. The flagship journal should pursue indexing in the major databases from launch (as Paper 3 specified), should accumulate citation patterns that support its standing, and should publish work that the host disciplines can recognize as serious. The founding centers should advocate within their universities for the recognition of the field’s outlets in tenure and promotion decisions, with documented arguments about the standards the outlets maintain and the scholarly community they represent. The recognition work is slow, but its absence would substantially compromise the protection that the publication pathways are intended to provide.
4. Training Pathways
Paper 3 introduced the training pathways the field requires and the curriculum framework that would govern them. This section develops the workforce implications of those pathways with greater specificity.
4.1 Doctoral Training
Doctoral training is the most consequential of the workforce pathways because doctoral graduates are the scholars whose careers will sustain the field over the long term. The doctoral programs the field establishes — whether as dedicated programs at the founding centers or as concentrations within existing programs in host disciplines — will shape the field for decades through the scholars they produce.
The argument for dedicated doctoral programs in neglect studies, as distinct from concentrations within existing programs, depends on the field’s stage of development. In the first decade, dedicated programs are probably premature: the field is too small to sustain them, the demand for graduates is too uncertain to justify the institutional commitment, and the curricular standards are not yet developed enough to support consistent training across multiple institutions. The recommendation in this period is that doctoral training should be delivered through concentrations within existing doctoral programs in host disciplines, with the concentration providing the field-specific coursework and the host program providing the substantive grounding.
In the second decade, dedicated programs become more plausible, particularly at the founding centers where the institutional commitment has been established and the demand for graduates from funding agencies, universities, and policy bodies has been demonstrated. The transition from concentrations to dedicated programs should be deliberate, with the existing concentrations continuing to operate as alternative pathways even after dedicated programs are established. The pluralism in training pathways serves the field’s broader inclusiveness and accommodates students whose institutional circumstances make concentrations more accessible than dedicated programs.
The funding of doctoral students requires specific attention. Doctoral students in conventional programs are typically funded through teaching assistantships, research assistantships on faculty grants, and institutional fellowships. The first and third of these are available to neglect-studies students through the host disciplines, but the second is constrained by the field’s funding situation (Paper 4) since the grants that would support research assistantships are themselves limited. The implication is that the field’s centers should establish dedicated doctoral fellowships as a priority, both to support students directly and to demonstrate to host institutions that the field has the resources to sustain its training commitments. Dedicated doctoral fellowships are also one of the more tractable targets for philanthropic funding, since the giving is concrete, the recipients are identifiable, and the returns on the investment are visible.
4.2 Master’s-Level Training
Master’s training serves a different function from doctoral training and accordingly should be designed differently. The constituencies for master’s training are scholars who want methodological literacy in the field without retraining as full neglect-studies scholars, practitioners in funding agencies and policy bodies who need to engage with the field’s outputs, and journalists, science communicators, and other professionals who write about research-priority questions.
The master’s curriculum should emphasize methodological breadth and applied capacity rather than substantive grounding, on the assumption that students bring their substantive expertise from prior training. The structure should accommodate part-time enrollment and distance learning, since many of the relevant students will be employed full-time and cannot relocate for residential study. The credential should be recognized in the professional contexts the students will work in, which requires the founding centers to engage with funding agencies, learned societies, and policy bodies to establish the master’s degree as appropriate preparation for the relevant roles.
A specific consideration is the relationship between the master’s program and the doctoral program. Some master’s students will subsequently want to pursue doctoral training, and the master’s curriculum should be designed to support that transition without requiring redundant coursework. The structure should also accommodate the reverse: doctoral students who decide partway through their training that their interests are better served by completing a master’s degree rather than a doctorate. The flexibility serves the students’ interests and supports the field’s broader inclusiveness.
4.3 Continuing Professional Education
Continuing education for established scholars who want to incorporate neglect-studies methods into their work is a third training stream with its own design considerations. The format should be intensive short courses, typically one to two weeks, held at the founding centers or in conjunction with the annual congress. Topics should be modular, so that participants can take individual courses without committing to a full program, and the courses should be designed to support the work of scholars whose primary identification will remain in their host disciplines rather than to convert them to full neglect-studies scholars.
The continuing-education stream serves the field’s longer-term consolidation by extending its methodological reach into adjacent disciplines and by building a network of scholars in other fields who are familiar with the field’s work. The network has practical value in providing informed reviewers for the field’s outlets, collaborators for the field’s projects, and translators of the field’s work to broader audiences. The stream also generates revenue, since participants typically pay for continuing-education courses, and the revenue can support the field’s other training activities.
The certification associated with continuing-education courses should be modest. Course completion certificates appropriate for participants’ continuing-professional-development records are reasonable; a credential that competes with formal master’s or doctoral training is not. The distinction matters because the field’s professional credibility depends on its credentials being earned through serious training rather than through short courses, and any tendency to inflate continuing-education credentials would damage the standing of the longer training pathways.
4.4 Informal Training and Self-Education
A substantial fraction of the field’s eventual workforce will not receive formal training in neglect studies at all. They will be scholars whose primary training is in other disciplines, who encounter the field through their substantive work, and who develop methodological and conceptual literacy through self-education, reading, and engagement with the field’s literature and community. The informal pathway is the dominant one in any emerging field, and neglect studies is no exception.
The field’s responsibilities to informally trained scholars include making the literature accessible (open-access publication, clear writing, documented methods), providing entry points for newcomers (introductory courses, review articles, methodological tutorials), and welcoming informally trained scholars into the professional community on terms that do not require formal credentials. The professional association the field eventually develops should explicitly accommodate informally trained members and should not adopt membership criteria that exclude them.
A specific consideration is the relationship between informally trained scholars and the field’s quality standards. The methodological standards of Paper 2 apply to the field’s work regardless of how the scholars who do the work were trained, and the field’s outlets should evaluate submissions against the standards rather than against the credentials of the authors. The structure preserves the field’s standards while remaining inclusive of scholars whose pathways into the field do not include formal training, and it depends on the field’s outlets being run by editors and reviewers whose evaluations focus on the work rather than on the authors’ credentials.
5. Mentorship and Community Formation
The professional development of scholars in any field depends substantially on mentorship and on the informal networks through which knowledge, norms, and opportunities circulate. The mentorship problem in neglect studies has specific features that the field’s workforce strategy must address.
The first feature is that the senior scholars who would naturally serve as mentors are themselves scarce in the field’s early years. A field that does not yet have many senior figures cannot offer the mentorship density that established fields provide, and the early-career scholars in the field must accept a mentorship environment that is thinner than the one their counterparts in established disciplines enjoy. The corrective is partial: deliberate effort to extend the available mentorship capacity through cross-institutional networks, through inclusion of senior scholars from adjacent fields as mentors for substantive aspects of the work, and through structures that allow early-career scholars to mentor one another in ways that established mentorship cultures do not typically support.
The second feature is that the mentorship the field requires differs from the mentorship typical of single-discipline training. A neglect-studies scholar needs mentorship on substantive questions in their host discipline, on the methodological work that the field’s training emphasizes, and on the career navigation specific to interdisciplinary work in an emerging field. No single mentor is likely to be able to provide all three, and the field’s mentorship structures should be explicit about constructing mentorship teams rather than assigning single mentors.
The third feature is that mentorship in the field must address the career risks discussed in section 3 above. Senior scholars who have navigated the relevant risks themselves are valuable mentors, but they are scarce, and the field’s mentorship structures must be able to draw on senior scholars from adjacent fields whose experience is informative even when not identical. The mentorship conversation should include explicit discussion of risk management, with the senior scholars sharing what they have learned about navigating the career challenges that the early-career scholars face.
The community formation that supports mentorship operates through the field’s conferences, workshops, journals, and informal communication channels. The structures the preceding papers have specified — the annual congress, the specialized workshops, the flagship journal and companion outlets, the registry — all serve community-formation functions in addition to their primary purposes. The workforce strategy should attend explicitly to how these structures support community formation and should design them with that function in view.
A specific consideration is the inclusion of early-career scholars in the field’s governance and editorial structures. Junior representation on the editorial board of the flagship, on the program committee of the annual congress, on the editorial committee of the registry, and on the governance bodies of the founding centers serves both the practical function of bringing fresh perspectives and the developmental function of giving early-career scholars the experience of contributing to the field’s institutional work. The inclusion should be deliberate, with explicit positions reserved for junior scholars and with the positions providing genuine influence rather than nominal participation.
6. Practitioners and Lived-Experience Contributors
The field’s mission includes attention to questions whose neglect bears on communities whose concerns have not been adequately represented in scholarly research. The constituency-less questions category in the Paper 1 taxonomy, and the peripheral inquiries category, both bear on this concern, and the priority-setting partnership tradition that the field draws on has developed explicit structures for including affected communities in research design.
The workforce strategy should accordingly include practitioners and lived-experience contributors as full members of the scholarly community rather than as informants or consultants. The distinction matters. A practitioner who is included as an informant provides information that the scholarly researchers analyze; a practitioner who is included as a full member of the community participates in the design of the research, in the interpretation of findings, and in the production of conclusions. The latter inclusion is more demanding institutionally and more rewarding intellectually, and the field’s structures should support it.
The specific structures that support full inclusion include: practitioner co-investigator roles on research projects, with the practitioners involved from the design stage rather than recruited at the data-collection stage; lived-experience contributor positions on editorial boards and governance bodies, with the positions providing genuine influence; training programs designed to support the participation of practitioners and lived-experience contributors who do not have conventional research training; and authorship practices that recognize the contributions of practitioners and lived-experience contributors to research outputs.
The structures require deliberate design and ongoing maintenance. The default patterns of academic work tend toward the exclusion of non-academic contributors, and the structures that support inclusion must be defended against the gravitational pull toward the default. The defense requires institutional commitment from the founding centers, editorial commitment from the field’s outlets, and professional commitment from the field’s individual scholars to maintain the practices in their own work.
A specific consideration is the compensation of practitioners and lived-experience contributors. Academic work has well-established compensation patterns — salaries, grants, honoraria, publication credits — that do not adequately compensate non-academic contributors for their participation. The field’s structures should include explicit provisions for compensating practitioners and lived-experience contributors at rates that reflect the value of their contributions, with the compensation provided through mechanisms that do not require the contributors to navigate the bureaucratic complexity of academic payment systems.
7. Professional Infrastructure
The professional infrastructure of the field — associations, credentialing, standards — must be developed deliberately, and the decisions about its design have long-term consequences for the field’s character. The discussion below addresses the major questions the field must answer.
7.1 Professional Association
A professional association for neglect studies provides several functions that the founding centers and the journal alone cannot provide. The association maintains the field’s membership records, organizes the annual congress, administers the credentialing structures the field eventually adopts, advocates for the field’s interests in research-policy contexts, and provides the institutional voice that speaks for the field as a whole.
The association should be established once the field has accumulated a critical mass of members, probably in the second half of its first decade. Earlier establishment is premature because the membership base is too small to support the association’s operations; later establishment is risky because the functions the association provides become harder to assemble after the field has developed without them.
The association’s structure should be governed by its members, with elected leadership, term limits, and explicit provisions for inclusion of diverse perspectives within the field. The membership criteria should be inclusive of the various pathways into the field discussed in section 4 above, with formal credentials not being a requirement for membership. The dues structure should accommodate scholars and practitioners with different income levels, with the developing-country and student rates set low enough to allow genuine participation rather than being symbolic concessions.
7.2 Credentialing
The credentialing question — whether the field should develop formal certification for its scholars and on what terms — is more difficult than the association question. The case for credentialing is that it provides quality assurance for the field’s outputs, that it supports the recognition of the field by external institutions, and that it creates clear pathways for career development. The case against is that credentialing tends to consolidate the field around the credentialing body’s preferences, that it raises barriers to entry that exclude informally trained scholars, and that it can become an end in itself rather than a means to the field’s broader purposes.
The recommendation is that formal credentialing should be deferred at least until the field’s second decade and possibly indefinitely. The field’s quality assurance can be provided through the journal’s peer review, the registry’s evidence-tier system, and the professional reputation of individual scholars within the community, without requiring formal certification. The recognition by external institutions can be supported by the documented standards the field maintains in its other infrastructure, without requiring a credential that the institutions can refer to. And the career pathways can be supported by the training programs and mentorship structures without requiring a credential at their endpoint.
If formal credentialing is eventually developed, it should be limited in scope and modest in its claims. A credential that certifies completion of specific methodological training is more defensible than a credential that claims to certify someone as a neglect-studies scholar in general, and the field should be cautious about expanding any credential it adopts beyond its initial scope.
7.3 Professional Standards
Professional standards for the field — what counts as ethical practice, what conflicts of interest must be disclosed, what evidence standards apply to different kinds of claims — should be developed explicitly and documented in a code of practice that the professional association maintains. The standards should draw on the established standards of adjacent fields where they apply, and should add field-specific provisions where the field’s distinctive features require them.
Specific provisions that the field’s standards should address include: the disclosure of funding sources for work that bears on the funders’ own decision-making (a consideration that arises directly from the funding strategy of Paper 4); the standards for representing absent constituencies in work on constituency-less questions (a consideration from Paper 2); the standards for protecting interview subjects whose accounts bear on professional reputations and institutional relationships (a consideration from Paper 5); and the standards for engagement with research-governing institutions (a consideration that Paper 7 will develop further).
The standards should be developed through a consensus process that includes the field’s diverse perspectives, should be reviewed periodically as the field’s experience accumulates, and should be enforced through professional norms rather than through formal disciplinary procedures. The enforcement question is delicate: formal disciplinary procedures require institutional infrastructure that the field will not have for many years, and informal enforcement through professional norms depends on the field’s community being cohesive enough for the norms to operate. The recommendation is to rely on informal enforcement during the field’s early years, with the possibility of more formal procedures considered if the informal mechanisms prove inadequate.
8. Timeline and Risks
The workforce development outlined above operates on a timeline considerably longer than the other infrastructure work the series has discussed. The rough timeline is as follows.
In the first three years, the founding centers should establish the doctoral concentrations within host disciplines, recruit the first cohorts of doctoral students, and begin the cross-institutional mentorship networks. The first master’s programs can launch in this period if institutional support permits, though the second half of the first decade is more realistic.
In years four through seven, the first cohort of doctoral graduates emerges, the master’s programs are operating, and the continuing-education stream is established. The professional association should be founded in this period, and the field’s community begins to recognize itself as a community rather than a collection of individual scholars.
In years eight through twelve, the early-career scholars from the first doctoral cohort move into junior faculty positions, the mentorship density begins to increase as more senior figures emerge, and the question of dedicated doctoral programs becomes pressing. The second-generation scholars trained by the first generation begin to emerge.
In years thirteen and beyond, the field reaches what counts as maturity: established doctoral programs, recognized credentials, a critical mass of senior scholars, and a professional community that operates with the conventions and capacities of established fields. The exact timeline depends on the pace at which the field grows, which depends in turn on the funding situation, the demand for the field’s outputs, and the broader research-policy environment.
The risks the workforce strategy must anticipate include several that deserve explicit treatment. The first is that the field grows too quickly relative to its capacity to maintain quality, producing graduates whose training does not meet the standards the field requires and damaging the credibility of the credentials the field offers. The corrective is to maintain selective admissions to the training programs and to resist the pressure to expand capacity beyond what can be supported with adequate mentorship and resources.
The second risk is that the field grows too slowly to sustain the institutional infrastructure that the preceding papers have specified. A flagship journal needs a steady flow of submissions and reviewers; a registry needs entries; a conference needs attendees. If the workforce does not grow to support these activities, the institutional infrastructure becomes a burden rather than a foundation. The corrective is to plan the institutional infrastructure with realistic estimates of workforce growth and to scale the infrastructure as the workforce develops.
The third risk is that the field’s workforce becomes demographically narrow, drawing scholars predominantly from particular institutions, particular regions, particular socioeconomic backgrounds, or particular substantive areas. The narrowness would compromise the field’s intellectual breadth and its credibility in addressing the equity concerns that some of its work bears on. The corrective is deliberate attention to recruitment, to fellowship targeting, and to the institutional accessibility of the training programs, with the attention sustained over the long period required for demographic patterns to change.
The fourth risk is the one that connects most directly to the field’s mission. A field that examines the patterns of attention in scholarly inquiry must be willing to examine its own attention patterns, and the workforce strategy must include the reflexive commitments that allow such self-examination. The reflexive work is uncomfortable and tends to be deferred, and the field’s professional norms must explicitly support it. Paper 8 takes up the broader question of the field’s reflexive identity, and the workforce strategy must be designed in coordination with that work.
9. Conclusion
This paper has proposed a workforce strategy for neglect studies that combines demanding skill requirements with explicit mechanisms for managing career risk, multiple training pathways with structures for mentorship and community formation, the inclusion of practitioners and lived-experience contributors as full members of the scholarly community, and the gradual development of professional infrastructure with caution about premature consolidation. The strategy operates on a longer timeline than the other elements of the field’s founding work, and its results become visible only after the field’s first decade has substantially passed.
The workforce strategy cannot be implemented without the institutional infrastructure of Paper 3, the funding of Paper 4, and the data resources of Paper 5. The strategy presupposes the methodological standards of Paper 2 and the conceptual framework of Paper 1. The interdependencies remain the dominant feature of the series, and the workforce paper is no exception.
Paper 7 takes up the field’s engagement with the research-governing institutions whose decisions the field exists to inform. The workforce that this paper has discussed is the workforce that will conduct that engagement, and the design of the engagement structures must accordingly attend to who is available to staff them.
Notes
[^1]: The literature on the career challenges of interdisciplinary scholars is reviewed in Rhoten and Parker (2004) and in the more recent treatment by Leahey, Beckman, and Stanko (2017). The findings are consistent across multiple settings: interdisciplinary work tends to have higher long-term impact but lower short-term recognition, with the career consequences falling more heavily on early-career scholars.
[^2]: The joint-appointment literature is partly empirical and partly practical; Pfirman and Martin (2010) provides one useful treatment, and the operational documents of comparable interdisciplinary fields provide additional guidance.
[^3]: The literature on doctoral training in interdisciplinary fields, introduced in Paper 3, develops further in Holley (2009, 2017) and in the subsequent work on the structure and outcomes of cross-disciplinary doctoral programs.
[^4]: The patient and public involvement literature, cited in Papers 2 and 4, provides extensive treatment of the inclusion of non-academic contributors in research; see Manafò, Petermann, Vandall-Walker, and Mason-Lai (2018) and the broader literature it reviews.
[^5]: The literature on professional associations in emerging fields is largely practical, drawing on the histories of comparable cases; the institutional documents of recently established interdisciplinary associations (the Society for the History of Recent Social Science, the Metascience Society) provide useful templates.
[^6]: The credentialing literature in adjacent fields is reviewed in Lester (2009) and in the subsequent work on professional certification in interdisciplinary contexts. The trade-offs the literature identifies are consistent with the analysis in section 7.2 above.
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