This paper analyzes the effect of interdisciplinarity on the scientific
impact of individual papers. Using all the papers published in Web of Science
in 2000, we define the degree of interdisciplinarity of a given paper 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 papers 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
papers 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:
papers citing citation intensive disciplines are more likely to be cited by
those disciplines and, hence, obtain higher citation scores than papers citing
non citation intensive disciplines.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. Forthcoming in JASIS
