On the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact

By Vincent Larivière, Yves Gingras. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2009

483 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article analyzes the effect of interdisciplinarity on the scientific impact of individual articles. Using all the articles published in Web of Science in 2000, we define the degree of interdisciplinarity of a given article as the percentage of its cited references made to journals of other disciplines. We show that although for all disciplines combined there is no clear correlation between the level of interdisciplinarity of articles and their citation rates, there are nonetheless some disciplines in which a higher level of interdisciplinarity is related to a higher citation rates. For other disciplines, citations decline as interdisciplinarity grows. One characteristic is visible in all disciplines: Highly disciplinary and highly interdisciplinary articles have a low scientific impact. This suggests that there might be an optimum of interdisciplinarity beyond which the research is too dispersed to find its niche and under which it is too mainstream to have high impact. Finally, the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact is highly determined by the citation characteristics of the disciplines involved: Articles citing citation-intensive disciplines are more likely to be cited by those disciplines and, hence, obtain higher citation scores than would articles citing non-citation-intensive disciplines. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Subfields: Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a2fd4b4f71c80345625306bee3462095ce881a7a

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Citations in the corpus

Modeling Public Mood and Emotion: Twitter Sentiment and Socio-Economic Phenomena (2009, background): “Recently, emotion has been extracted from public communication on Myspace [24] and status updates on Facebook, but we could not find any large scale sentiment analysis of Twitter, other than a study focused on microbloggers’ response to the death of Michael Jackson [9].”
The science of science: from the perspective of complex systems (2017, result): “This claim was later supported by Lariviére and Gingras who also obtained an inverted U-shape relationship when analyzing all articles included in the WoS in 2000 [325].”
How journal rankings can suppress interdisciplinary research: A comparison between Innovation Studies and Business & Management (2012, background): “Other bibliometric studies have found that articles with an intermediate degree of interdisciplinarity are more likely to be cited than either the mono-disciplinary or the extremely interdisciplinary ones (e.g. Adams et al., 2007; Larivière and Gingras, 2010; Yegros-Yegros et al., 2010), and that in”
External validity of sentiment mining reports: Can current methods identify demographic biases, event biases, and manipulation of reviews? (2014, background): “The list of papers found is here: [12,14–17,26,28,31–35,43–60].”
Prominent but Less Productive (2015, background): “Because the relationship between interdisciplinary research and citation counts depends on the field (Hamilton, Narin, and Olivastro, 2005; Zitt, Ramanana-Rahary, and Bassecoulard, 2005; Larivière and Gingras, 2010), and because we wanted to rule out increased audience size as an alternative explana”
A review of theory and practice in scientometrics (2015, background): “There is currently little research in this area (Larivière & Gingras, 2010) although Rafols et al. (2012) found a systematic bias in research evaluation against interdisciplinary research in the field of business and management.”
Which factors help authors produce the highest impact research? Collaboration, journal and document properties (2013, background): “…the impact of the publishing journal (Boyack & Klavans, 2005), collaboration (Gazni & Didegah, 2010), the interdisciplinarity of the article references (Larivière & Gingras, 2010), the number and impact of references (Boyack & Klavans, 2005), and the size of the related field (Lovaglia, 1989).”
Understanding the Effect of Gender and Stance in Opinion Expression in Debates on “Abortion” (2018, background): “Thelwall et al. (2010) has looked at the comments on MySpace and found that females are more likely to give and receive more positive comments than are males, but there”