Interdisciplinarity and impact: distinct effects of variety, balance, and disparity.

ABSTRACT: Interdisciplinary research is increasingly recognized as the solution to today's challenging scientific and societal problems, but the relationship between interdisciplinary research and scientific impact is still unclear. This paper studies the association between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the number of citations at the paper level. Different from previous studies compositing various aspects of interdisciplinarity into a single indicator, we use factor analysis to uncover distinct dimensions of interdisciplinarity corresponding to variety, balance, and disparity. We estimate Poisson models with journal fixed effects and robust standard errors to analyze the divergent relationships between these three factors and citations. We find that long-term (13-year) citations (1) increas

SUBMITTER: Wang J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4441438 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature