NEWS FEATURE

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Interdisciplinary work is considered crucial by
scientists, policymakers and funders — but
how widespread is it really, and what impact

BY THE NUMBERS
does it have? Scholars say that the concept is
complex to define and measure, but efforts to
map papers by the disciplines of the journals
they appear in and by their citation patterns
are — tentatively — revealing the growth and
influence of interdisciplinary research.
An analysis reveals the extent and impact
of research that bridges disciplines. INTERDISCIPLINARITY
A Nature special issue
nature.com/inter
B Y R I C H A R D VA N N O O R D E N

1 Interdisciplinary research is on the rise

RE FE RE N CES RH E TOR IC
Since the mid-1980s, research papers have increasingly cited work outside their own disciplines. Discourse about interdisciplinary research is
The analysis shown here used journal names to assign more than 35 million papers in the Web of increasing. The fraction of papers that mention
Science to 14 major conventional disciplines (such as biology or physics) and 143 specialities. The interdisciplinarity in their title has fluctuated,
fraction of paper references that point to work in other disciplines is increasing in both the natural perhaps reflecting the priorities of funders, but
and the social sciences. The fraction that points to another speciality in the same discipline (for the twenty-first century saw that proportion
example, a genetics paper pointing to zoology) shows a slight decline. reach an all-time high.

Natural sciences and engineering Social sciences Papers with “interdisciplinar*” in title (%)

SOURCE: V. LARIVIÈRE & Y. GINGRAS IN BEYOND BIBLIOMETRICS

(EDS B. CRONIN & C. R. SUGIMOTO) 187–200 (MIT PRESS, 2014)
60 0.06
Social sciences and humanities
Natural sciences and engineering
0.05

40 0.04
References (%)

0.03

20 0.02

References within same speciality 0.01

References to other specialties in same discipline
References to other disciplines
0 0
1950 2010 1950 2010 1950 2010

2 Interdisciplinary research takes time to have an impact

IMPAC T Three years after publication: less impact Thirteen years after publication: more impact
Citations decrease as a paper’s interdisciplinarity increases. Citations increase as a paper’s interdisciplinarity increases.
Whether interdisciplinary
research gains more citations +15
SOURCE: J. WANG ET AL. PLOS ONE 10, E0127298 (2015)

Less interdisciplinarity More interdisciplinarity

than disciplinary research is In the long term, citations
+10 rise sharply when a
Change in average citations (%)

contentious. Over three years, paper’s references point

papers with diverse references to distant disciplines (for
tend to pick up fewer citations +5 example, engineering
and biology).
than the norm, but over
13 years they gain more. Some 0
studies suggest that a little
Mean interdisciplinarity

Two measures of
interdisciplinarity is better than -5 interdisciplinarity
a lot: papers that combine very Variety: the spread
disparate fields tend to earn fewer -10 of references
across disciplines
citations. But interdisciplinary
Disparity: the ‘intellectual
work can have broad societal and -15 distance’ between
economic impacts that are not disciplines in references
captured by citations. -20

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 FEATURE NEWS

3 Some fields are more interdisciplinary than others …

100%
SOURCE: V. LARIVIÈRE & C. R. SUGIMOTO (PERS. COMM.)

A MEASURE O F I N TER D I SC I PL I N A R I T Y More interdisciplinary

In this chart, more-interdisciplinary fields are
in the top-right quadrant. A field’s position
90
is determined by how much its papers cite
outside disciplines (x-axis), and by how much
outside disciplines subsequently cite the
Social studies of medicine
80 papers ( y-axis). Papers from 2001–10 were
assigned to disciplines and specialities on the
General biology
basis of their journals, using a US National
Science Foundation classification system.
70 Geriatrics & gerontology
NATURE.COM General
biomedical
For an interactive version of this research
graphic, visit: go.nature.com/z9m3gy
Citations from outside disciplines

Health seems very

60 interdisciplinary because it
incorporates broad fields
such as public health and
Chemical physics
Physiology social aspects of medicine.

50
Probability & statistics Materials science

Anthropology and archaeology

40 Virology
Economics
Clinical medicine
Nursing Arts
papers rarely cite,
or are cited by, other Biology
30 disciplines, perhaps Biomedical research
because they deal Chemistry
with specialized
medical practice. Clinical medicine
Earth and space
20 Engineering and technology
International
relations Health
Humanities
Inorganic & nuclear chemistry
Mathematics
10 Astronomy & astrophysics Physics
Nuclear & particle physics Psychology
Social sciences
Less interdisciplinary
0% 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100%
References to outside disciplines

4 … and so are some countries

MOST INTERD ISCIPLINARY C O UN TR I ES A separate analysis counted the proportion of a
SOURCE: PERS. COMM./ELSEVIER;
HTTP://GO.NATURE.COM/UCPXVD

SOURCE: V. LARIVIÈRE (PERS. COMM.)

A 2015 study by researchers with the publisher Elsevier defined interdisciplinary papers as those paper’s references that are in other disciplines.
that reference journals that are rarely cited together. The report looked only at countries that routinely After totting up all the papers for each country,
publish more than 30,000 papers per year to find the ‘most interdisciplinary’ countries for 2013. and normalizing the results (so that average
interdisciplinarity = 1), similar nations emerge
on top for 2013.
13.0% 12.4%
Publications in world’s top 10%

11.9%
of interdisciplinary papers (%)

11.2% 11.0% 10.3% 9.7% 9.7% 9.1%

1. Mainland China (1.09†)
8.5%
2. India (1.07)

3. Taiwan (1.06)

4. Brazil (1.04)

5. Australia (1.02) and South Korea (1.02)

India Mainland Taiwan South Brazil Italy United Japan United Germany
China Korea States Kingdom †
9% higher than world’s average interdisciplinarity

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