On the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact

TL;DR

This study investigates how the level of interdisciplinarity in scientific papers affects their citation impact, revealing discipline-dependent effects and an optimal balance for maximum influence.

Contribution

It introduces a quantitative measure of interdisciplinarity based on cited references and analyzes its relationship with citation impact across disciplines.

Findings

Some disciplines show positive correlation between interdisciplinarity and citations.

Highly disciplinary and highly interdisciplinary papers tend to have lower impact.

Citing citation-intensive disciplines increases a paper's likelihood of higher citations.

Abstract

This paper analyzes the effect of interdisciplinarity on the scientific impact of individual papers. Using all the papers published in Web of Science in 2000, we define the degree of interdisciplinarity of a given paper as the percentage of its cited references made to journals of other disciplines. We show that, although for all disciplines combined there is no clear correlation between the level of interdisciplinarity of papers and their citation rates, there are nonetheless some disciplines in which a higher level of interdisciplinarity is related to a higher citation rates. For other disciplines, citations decline as interdisciplinarity grows. One characteristic is visible in all disciplines: highly disciplinary and highly interdisciplinary papers have a low scientific impact. This suggests that there might be an optimum of interdisciplinarity beyond which the research is too dispersed to find its niche and under which it is too mainstream to have high impact. Finally, the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact is highly determined by the citation characteristics of the disciplines involved: papers citing citation intensive disciplines are more likely to be cited by those disciplines and, hence, obtain higher citation scores than papers citing non citation intensive disciplines.