Does interdisciplinarity attract more social media attention?

Abstract

The impact of interdisciplinarity is a popular research topic, but most studies on this subject focus mainly on scientific impact. In recent years, social media platforms have become useful tools for assessing broader effects beyond scientific or academic impacts. Thus, exploring the effect of interdisciplinarity on social media platforms may yield interesting results. In order to examine the relationship between interdisciplinarity and social media attention, we analysed all publications in the Scopus database for the years 2018 and 2019. Three social media platforms with the highest coverage of research articles, Mendeley, Twitter and Facebook, and three common interdisciplinarity indicators, Leinster-Cobbold diversity indices (LCDiv), Rao-Stirling diversity (RS) and DIV, were applied to cross-validate our findings. It appears that interdisciplinarity does increase social media attention on Mendeley, Twitter and Facebook alike. The results indicate that interdisciplinary research indeed can attract more social media attention.