Delayed Impact of Interdisciplinary Research

TL;DR

This paper investigates the delayed impact of interdisciplinary research by analyzing citation dynamics, revealing that such research takes longer to reach citation peaks and is influenced by factors beyond traditional effects, with implications for science policy.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale quantitative analysis showing that interdisciplinary research exhibits delayed impact and explores underlying mechanisms beyond the Matthew effect.

Findings

Interdisciplinary papers reach citation peaks later than disciplinary ones.

Delayed impact is influenced by factors beyond the Matthew effect.

Team size and content conventionality only partly explain the delay.

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research increasingly fuels innovation, and is considered to be a key to tomorrow breakthrough. Yet little is known about whether interdisciplinary research manifests delayed impact. Here, we use the time to reach the citation peak to quantify the highest impact time and citation dynamics, and examine its relationship with interdisciplinarity. Using large scale publication datasets, our results suggest that interdisciplinary papers show significant delayed impact both microscopically per paper and macroscopically collectively, as it takes longer time for interdisciplinary papers to reach their citation peak. Furthermore, we study the underlying forces of such delayed impact, finding that the effect goes beyond the Matthew effect (i.e., the rich-get-richer effect). Finally, we find that team size and content conventionality only partly account for this effect. Overall, our results suggest that governments, research administrators, funding agencies should be aware of this general feature of interdisciplinary science, which may have broad policy implications.