Interdisciplinarity and Impact: Distinct Effects of Variety, Balance, and Disparity

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research is increasingly recognized as the solution to today’s challenging scientific and societal problems, but the relationship between interdisciplinary research and scientific impact is still unclear. This paper studies the association between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the number of citations at the paper level. Different from previous studies compositing various aspects of interdisciplinarity into a single indicator, we use factor analysis to uncover distinct dimensions of interdisciplinarity corresponding to variety, balance, and disparity. We estimate Poisson models with journal fixed effects and robust standard errors to analyze the divergent relationships between these three factors and citations. We find that long-term (13-year) citations (1) increase at an increasing rate with variety, (2) decrease with balance, and (3) increase at a decreasing rate with disparity. Furthermore, interdisciplinarity also affects the process of citation accumulation: (1) although variety and disparity have positive effects on long-term citations, they have negative effects on short-term (3-year) citations, and (2) although balance has a negative effect on long-term citations, its negative effect is insignificant in the short run. These findings have important implications for interdisciplinary research and science policy.

Antecedents and near-term consequences for interdisciplinary dissertators

“…Looking beyond salary and employment status as outcome variables, future longitudinal research should also examine whether interdisciplinary dissertators might show either better or worse or more divergent patterns of research impact. For example, Wang et al (2015)—building on Rinia et al (2001) as well as Tsay and Ma (2003)—show that interdisciplinary research tends to be cited more than other work over longer periods of time (e.g., 13 years post-publication) compared with shorter-terms (e.g., 3 years post-publication). “Sleeping beauty” manuscripts such as those studied by Gorry and Ragouet (2016) similarly help to illustrate the broader trend of lagged success for interdisciplinary research.…”

Specialization versus diversification in research activities: the extent, intensity and relatedness of field diversification by individual scientists

“…Many studies take a bottom-up approach, building from measurement of interdisciplinarity for individual articles. The proposed measures are based on the disciplinary profile of the references cited, considering that reference to the preceding literature in various disciplines is as a signal of acquisition and integration of the results of these disciplines (Porter, Cohen, Roessner & Perreault, 2007;Rafols & Meyer, 2010;Wang, Thijs & Glänzel, 2015;Mugabushaka, Kyriakou & Papazoglou, 2016). In particular, Porter & Rafols (2009) used the works published in a cluster of selected journals indexed in the WoS over the period 2007-2011, examining their relative lists of references and identifying the disciplinary areas of the works cited, in terms of: i) number of subject categories (SCs) cited; ii) distribution of the citations among the SCs; iii) similarity or disparity among these SCs.…”

Analysing Institutions Interdisciplinarity by Extensive Use of Rao-Stirling Diversity Index

“…For instance, it prevents from distinguishing between close (or proximal [6]) and remote (or distal) interdisciplinarity and deciphering the relationship of these different dimensions of interdisciplinarity with impact. The effect on short term citations of these different dimensions leads to contradictory results [6, 28, 29], partly due to different decompositions of interdisciplinarity. However, it is suggested that in a long term perspective (citations in a 13-year window), variety and disparity may have a positive effect on impact [28].…”

“…The effect on short term citations of these different dimensions leads to contradictory results [6, 28, 29], partly due to different decompositions of interdisciplinarity. However, it is suggested that in a long term perspective (citations in a 13-year window), variety and disparity may have a positive effect on impact [28]. As remote interdisciplinarity is much more demanding from researchers and institutions, it may be worth to use some of these other indicators to analyse specific strategic options.…”