Long-distance interdisciplinarity leads to higher scientific impact

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. Thi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2015-03, Vol.10 (3), p.e0122565-e0122565
Main Authors: Larivière, Vincent, Haustein, Stefanie, Börner, Katy
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bibliometrics
Citation analysis
Citations
Cooperative Behavior
Failure analysis
Informetrics
Interdisciplinary aspects
Interdisciplinary research
Interdisciplinary studies
Interdisciplinary Studies - statistics & numerical data
International organizations
Journal Impact Factor
Physics
Science
Science - statistics & numerical data
Scientific papers
Scientometrics
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0122565