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On the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact
Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras
TL;DR
Whether interdisciplinarity is linked to scientific impact remains an empirical question despite its frequent endorsement. An analysis of Web of Science papers from 2000 finds no clear overall correlation, with field-specific directions and lower impact at both extremes.
Problem
Despite being widely regarded as positive, interdisciplinarity’s relationship to scientific impact remains an empirical question.
Source: pp. 1, 7Method
Using Web of Science papers from 2000, the study measures each paper’s interdisciplinarity as the share of references to other disciplines and compares it with impact.
Source: p. 3Results
Across disciplines, there is no clear overall correlation; within fields, interdisciplinarity tracks higher or lower citation rates, while both extremes show lower impact.
Source: pp. 4, 7Takeaways & Limitations
The findings caution against treating interdisciplinarity itself as a universal marker of high-impact research.
Source: p. 7Only references to other Web of Science source items could be classified, covering about 65% of cited references overall and varying greatly by field.
Source: p. 3
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
This paper analyzes the effect of interdisciplinarity on the scientific impact of individual papers. Using all the papers published in Web of Science in 2000, we define the degree of interdisciplinarity of a given paper as the percentage of its cited references made to journals of other disciplines. We show that, although for all disciplines combined there is no clear correlation between the level of interdisciplinarity of papers and their citation rates, there are nonetheless some disciplines in which a higher level of interdisciplinarity is related to a higher citation rates. For other disciplines, citations decline as interdisciplinarity grows. One characteristic is visible in all disciplines: highly disciplinary and highly interdisciplinary papers have a low scientific impact. This suggests that there might be an optimum of interdisciplinarity beyond which the research is too dispersed to find its niche and under which it is too mainstream to have high impact. Finally, the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact is highly determined by the citation characteristics of the disciplines involved: papers citing citation intensive disciplines are more likely to be cited by those disciplines and, hence, obtain higher citation scores than papers citing non citation intensive disciplines.