The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers

TL;DR

This study uses bibliographic coupling networks from physics papers to classify papers as mainstream, interdisciplinary, or out-of-the-box, revealing trends over time and their citation impacts, highlighting the need for new incentives to promote diversity in scientific research.

Contribution

The paper introduces a network-based method to quantify mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity of scientific papers using bibliographic coupling, applied to a century of physics literature.

Findings

Mainstream papers have increased over time.

Interdisciplinary papers maintain a constant share.

Both mainstream and interdisciplinary papers receive citations, but long-term performance favors interdisciplinary.

Abstract

There is demand from science funders, industry, and the public that science should become more risk-taking, more out-of-the-box, and more interdisciplinary. Is it possible to tell how interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box scientific papers are, or which papers are mainstream? Here we use the bibliographic coupling network, derived from all physics papers that were published in the Physical Review journals in the past century, to try to identify them as mainstream, out-of-the-box, or interdisciplinary. We show that the network clusters into scientific fields. The position of individual papers with respect to these clusters allows us to estimate their degree of mainstreamness or interdisciplinary. We show that over the past decades the fraction of mainstream papers increases, the fraction of out-of-the-box decreases, and the fraction of interdisciplinary papers remains constant. Studying the rewards of papers, we find that in terms of absolute citations, both, mainstream and interdisciplinary papers are rewarded. In the long run, mainstream papers perform less than interdisciplinary ones in terms of citation rates. We conclude that to avoid a trend towards mainstreamness a new incentive scheme is necessary.