Interdisciplinary hierarchical diversity driving disruption

The increasingly widespread interdisciplinary intersections contrast with the declining levels of disruption across various disciplinary domains, posing a challenge to the advancement of science and technology. Therefore, How to effectively promote interdisciplinary research to truly achieve disruption has become a key research question in today's scientific and technological development. This study examined team's interdisciplinary patterns from the perspective of hierarchical diversity. The overall disciplinary diversity of teams (defined as $${\text{ID}}\gamma$$ ID γ ) was decomposed into individual interdisciplinary hierarchical diversity (defined as $$\text{ID}\alpha$$ ID α ) and team interdisciplinary hierarchical diversity (defined as $$\text{ID}\beta$$ ID β ). The research proposed a hierarchical decomposition method for measuring disciplinary diversity based on the Shannon information entropy index. Using 1026225 scientific papers from typical interdisciplinary fields of Quantum information, Nanomaterials, and Synthetic biology that span the period 2000–2022. The findings indicate that when $$\text{ID}\beta$$ ID β is more significant than $$\text{ID}\alpha$$ ID α , the team's level of disruption is higher. Moreover, under certain team sizes and disciplinary richness, higher $$\text{ID}\beta$$ ID β leads to a higher level of disruption within the team. Furthermore, this study discovered that teams comprising one generalist (with the highest $$\text{ID}\alpha$$ ID α value) and several specialists (with $$\text{ID}\alpha$$ ID α equal to 0) exhibit significant $$\text{ID}\beta$$ ID β , leading to the highest level of disruption. The study discoveries offer decision-making and policy guidelines for the collaborative patterns and funding strategies in interdisciplinary research for disruption.