Evaluating the impact of interdisciplinary research: a multilayer network approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multilayer network method to quantify the impact of interdisciplinarity on research influence, aiding evaluation for funding and hiring decisions.

Contribution

It presents a novel bipartite multilayer network approach to measure interdisciplinarity's effect on scholarly impact, applicable to various scientific entities.

Findings

Method effectively identifies impactful interdisciplinary research.

Application to physics and patents demonstrates practical utility.

Supports better evaluation of research influence across disciplines.

Abstract

Nowadays, scientific challenges usually require approaches that cross traditional boundaries between academic disciplines, driving many researchers towards interdisciplinarity. Despite its obvious importance, there is a lack of studies on how to quantify the influence of interdisciplinarity on the research impact, posing uncertainty in a proper evaluation for hiring and funding purposes. Here we propose a method based on the analysis of bipartite interconnected multilayer networks of citations and disciplines, to assess scholars, institutions and countries interdisciplinary importance. Using data about physics publications and US patents, we show that our method allows to reward, using a quantitative approach, scholars and institutions that have carried out interdisciplinary work and have had an impact in different scientific areas. The proposed method could be used by funding agencies, universities and scientific policy decision makers for hiring and funding purposes, and to complement existing methods to rank universities and countries.