Abstract
Although interdisciplinarity is often touted as a necessity for modern research, the evidence on the relative impact of sectorial versus to interdisciplinary science is qualitative at best. In this paper we leverage the bibliographic data set of the American Physical Society to quantify the role of interdisciplinarity in physics, and that of talent and luck in achieving success in scientific careers. We analyze a period of 30 years (1980-2009) tagging papers and their authors by means of the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS), to show that some degree of interdisciplinarity is quite helpful to reach success, measured as a proxy of either the number of articles or the citations score. We also propose an agent-based model of the publication-reputation-citation dynamics which reproduces the trends observed in the APS data set. On the one hand, the results highlight the crucial role of randomness and serendipity in real scientific research; on the other, they shed light on a counterintuitive effect indicating that the most talented authors are not necessarily the most successful ones.
Highlights
The importance and the beneficial role of interdisciplinarity is very often advocated in editorials of high impact journals, public speeches about innovative research policies and research proposal guidelines [1,2,3,4,5]
Level 3 group LA3 PS: N3 = 2347 authors with IiAPS > 6; The first goal of this study is to investigate if these different degrees of interdisciplinarity are correlated to the scientific impact of the active researchers of the American Physical Society (APS) data set, evaluated through both the number of papers and the citations cumulated during their careers
An analogous agreement with the APS data can be observed in Fig 6, where we show the distributions of the total number Ci(tmax) of citations cumulated by the authors of the three groups during the simulation of their careers
Summary
The importance and the beneficial role of interdisciplinarity is very often advocated in editorials of high impact journals, public speeches about innovative research policies and research proposal guidelines [1,2,3,4,5]. Starting and pursuing interdisciplinarity research projects is fraught with difficulties and risks. Funds are difficult to obtain because the evaluation of projects is frequently underestimated or misjudged, since they pertain to different disciplines, requiring a much broader assessment. Developing a common language among scientists with different backgrounds is tough and very time demanding. Despite such difficulties, there are several indications that the interdisciplinary character of research is growing and that this can be considered a positive signal for the progress of science
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