Long-distance interdisciplinarity leads to higher scientific impact

Vincent Larivière; Stefanie Haustein; Katy Börner

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0122565

Long-distance interdisciplinarity leads to higher scientific impact

PLoS One. 2015 Mar 30;10(3):e0122565. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0122565. eCollection 2015.

Authors

Vincent Larivière¹, Stefanie Haustein², Katy Börner³

Affiliations

¹ École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada; Observatoire des sciences et des technologies, Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Canada.
² École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada.
³ Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America.

Abstract

Scholarly collaborations across disparate scientific disciplines are challenging. Collaborators are likely to have their offices in another building, attend different conferences, and publish in other venues; they might speak a different scientific language and value an alien scientific culture. This paper presents a detailed analysis of success and failure of interdisciplinary papers--as manifested in the citations they receive. For 9.2 million interdisciplinary research papers published between 2000 and 2012 we show that the majority (69.9%) of co-cited interdisciplinary pairs are "win-win" relationships, i.e., papers that cite them have higher citation impact and there are as few as 3.3% "lose-lose" relationships. Papers citing references from subdisciplines positioned far apart (in the conceptual space of the UCSD map of science) attract the highest relative citation counts. The findings support the assumption that interdisciplinary research is more successful and leads to results greater than the sum of its disciplinary parts.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Cooperative Behavior
Interdisciplinary Studies / statistics & numerical data*
Journal Impact Factor*
Science / statistics & numerical data*

Associated data

figshare/10.6084/M9.FIGSHARE.1286974

Grants and funding

This research was funded by the Fonds Recherche Québec – Société et Culture, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Research Chairs program. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.