Interdisciplinarity revisited: evidence for research impact and dynamism

Addressing many of the world’s contemporary challenges requires a multifaceted and integrated approach, and interdisciplinary research (IDR) has become increasingly central to both academic interest and government science policies. Although higher interdisciplinarity is then often assumed to be associated with higher research impact, there has been little solid scientific evidence supporting this assumption. Here, we provide verifiable evidence that interdisciplinarity is statistically significantly and positively associated with research impact by focusing on highly cited paper clusters known as the research fronts (RFs). Interdisciplinarity is uniquely operationalised as the effective number of distinct disciplines involved in the RF, computed from the relative abundance of disciplines and the affinity between disciplines, where all natural sciences are classified into eight disciplines. The result of a multiple regression analysis (n = 2,560) showed that an increase by one in the effective number of disciplines was associated with an approximately 20% increase in the research impact, which was defined as a field-normalised citation-based measure. A new visualisation technique was then applied to identify the research areas in which high-impact IDR is underway and to investigate its evolution over time and across disciplines. Collectively, this work establishes a new framework for understanding the nature and dynamism of IDR in relation to existing disciplines and its relevance to science policymaking.