SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2022

Interdisciplinarity has been increasingly recognized as a recipe for innovative research and pedagogy. However, as academic institutions are primarily organized around disciplines, the practices of interdisciplinarity and their consequent scientific impact remain unclear. Current studies have found conflicting results about the impact of interdisciplinary research, with some suggesting that interdisciplinary research is more likely to bring breakthroughs while others suggest it is harder for such projects to attract funding and gain recognition.

To better understand the evolving landscape of interdisciplinarity, I analyzed 269,311 papers from 16 disciplines published between 2008 and 2018. First, I utilized network analysis to visualize the structure of scholarly collaboration across disciplines. Then, I applied natural language processing methods to explore the content of interdisciplinary research. Next, I analyzed the relationship between interdisciplinarity and the impact of scholars and publications with a variety of scientometric indices. Finally, I provided a brief theoretical analysis of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of research innovation.

I found that interdisciplinary collaboration between proximal research areas has become the norm, and researchers who collaborate across an atypical combination of fields tend to occupy key positions in the knowledge network. Though the latter generally receives lower attention in the short term, they tend to outperform their monodisciplinary counterparts in the long run and are more likely to be more disruptive and groundbreaking.