Abstract
Addressing many of the world’s contemporary challenges requires a multifaceted and integrated approach, and interdisciplinary research (IDR) has become increasingly central to both academic interest and government science policies. Although higher interdisciplinarity is then often assumed to be associated with higher research impact, there has been little solid scientific evidence supporting this assumption. Here, we provide verifiable evidence that interdisciplinarity is statistically significantly and positively associated with research impact by focusing on highly cited paper clusters known as the research fronts (RFs). Interdisciplinarity is uniquely operationalised as the effective number of distinct disciplines involved in the RF, computed from the relative abundance of disciplines and the affinity between disciplines, where all natural sciences are classified into eight disciplines. The result of a multiple regression analysis (n = 2,560) showed that an increase by one in the effective number of disciplines was associated with an approximately 20% increase in the research impact, which was defined as a field-normalised citation-based measure. A new visualisation technique was then applied to identify the research areas in which high-impact IDR is underway and to investigate its evolution over time and across disciplines. Collectively, this work establishes a new framework for understanding the nature and dynamism of IDR in relation to existing disciplines and its relevance to science policymaking.
Highlights
Addressing many of the world’s contemporary challenges requires a multifaceted and integrated approach, and interdisciplinary research (IDR) has become increasingly central to both academic interest and government science policies
Various national and international programmes, focusing especially on promoting IDR, have recently been launched and developed in many countries through specialised research funding and grants or through staff allocations (e.g., Davé et al, 2016a; Gleed and Marchant, 2016; Kuroki and Ukawa, 2017; NSF, 2019). Driving these pro-IDR policies and the attendant rhetoric is an implicit assumption that IDR is inherently beneficial and has a more substantial impact compared with traditional disciplinary research
This assumption has rarely been supported by solid scientific evidence, and in most cases, the supposed merit of IDR has been based on anecdotal evidence from specific narrative examples or case studies
Summary
Addressing many of the world’s contemporary challenges requires a multifaceted and integrated approach, and interdisciplinary research (IDR) has become increasingly central to both academic interest and government science policies. Based on the aforementioned operationalisations of the research impact and the interdisciplinarity index, the relationship between the two variables was analysed using a regression analysis method.
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