Is Interdisciplinary Collaboration Research More Disruptive Than Monodisciplinary Research?

Abstract

AbstractAs an important pattern of scientific research, interdisciplinary collaboration is universally encouraged by science and technology policy makers. However, it remains a question whether interdisciplinary collaboration research is more disruptive than monodisciplinary research. To address this research question in this study, interdisciplinary collaboration is measured as whether the authors of a paper are from at least two disciplines, and the degree of “disruptive” is measured by the Disruption index proposed by Funk & Owen‐Smith (2017). By using articles published in six journals from 1978 to 2019 in the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) database, we constructed an OLS regression model with journal fixed effect and time fixed effect to analyze the influence of interdisciplinary collaboration on the Disruption values with different citation windows. The findings show that interdisciplinary collaboration research is less disruptive than monodisciplinary research.