Does interdisciplinary research lead to higher citation impact? The different effect of proximal and distal interdisciplinarity

Abstract

This article analyses the effect of degree of interdisciplinarity on the citation impact of individual publications for four different scientific fields. Rather than treating interdisciplinarity as a monodimensional property, we investigate the separate effect of different aspects of interdisciplinarity on citation impact: i.e. variety, balance and disparity. We use a Tobit regression model to examine the effect of these properties on citation impact, controlling for other variables such as number of authors or organisations. We observe an inverted U-shape relationship between degree of interdisciplinarity and citation impact. We also find that variety has a positive effect on impact, whereas balance and disparity have a negative effect. These findings can be interpreted in two different ways. On the one hand, they are consistent with the view that, while combining multiple fields is good for reaching higher impact, successful research is better achieved through research efforts that draw on a relatively proximal range of fields with only a small proportion of contributions from distant fields - as distal interdisciplinary research might be too risky and more likely to fail. On the other hand, these results may be interpreted as suggesting that scientific audiences are reluctant to cite heterodox papers that mix many disparate bodies of knowledge? putting at a disadvantage publications that are purposefully challenging.