[Paper Review] Interdisciplinary research and technological impact.

Qing Ke|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jun 27, 2020

Research Data Management Practices4 citations

TL;DR

This study examines how interdisciplinarity influences technological impact at the paper level using three indicators—variety, balance, and disparity—across 18 years of biomedical research. It finds that higher variety and balance increase patent citation likelihood, while high disparity reduces this effect, though disparity boosts citation intensity among highly cited papers.

ABSTRACT

Interdisciplinary research has been considered as a solution to today's complex societal challenges. While its relationship with scientific impact has been extensively studied, the technological impact of interdisciplinary research remains unexplored. Here, we examine how interdisciplinarity is associated with technological impact at the paper level. We measure the degree of interdisciplinarity of a paper using three popular indicators, namely variety, balance, and disparity, and track how it gets cited by patented technologies over time. Drawing on a large sample of biomedical papers published in 18 years, we find that papers that cites more fields (variety) and whose distributions over those cited fields are more even (balance) are more likely to receive patent citations, but both effects can be offset if papers draw upon more distant fields (disparity). Those associations are consistent across different citation-window lengths. Additional analysis that focuses on the subset of papers with at least one patent citation reveals that the intensity of their technological impact, as measured as the number of patent citations, increases with balance and disparity. Our work may have policy implications for interdisciplinary research and scientific and technology impact.

Motivation & Objective

• To investigate the relationship between interdisciplinarity and technological impact in scientific research.
• To examine how different dimensions of interdisciplinarity—variety, balance, and disparity—affect patent citation likelihood and intensity.
• To assess whether the technological impact of interdisciplinary research varies across different citation time windows.
• To explore policy implications for fostering interdisciplinary research with measurable technological outcomes.

Proposed method

• Measuring interdisciplinarity using three indicators: variety (number of distinct fields cited), balance (evenness of citation distribution across fields), and disparity (distance between cited fields in a conceptual space).
• Tracking patent citations to biomedical papers over 18 years using a large-scale dataset of scientific publications.
• Analyzing the association between interdisciplinarity metrics and patent citation likelihood using survival analysis and regression models.
• Conducting additional analysis on papers with at least one patent citation to assess citation intensity as a function of interdisciplinarity.
• Evaluating robustness across different citation window lengths to ensure consistency of findings.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How does the variety of cited fields relate to the likelihood of a paper receiving patent citations?
• RQ2 To what extent does the balance of citations across fields influence technological impact?
• RQ3 How does the disparity between cited fields affect the probability and intensity of patent citations?
• RQ4 Does the relationship between interdisciplinarity and technological impact vary across different time windows?

Key findings

• Papers citing a greater variety of fields show a higher likelihood of receiving patent citations.
• Papers with more balanced citation distributions across fields are more likely to be cited by patented technologies.
• High disparity—citing fields that are conceptually distant—diminishes the positive effect of variety and balance on patent citation likelihood.
• Among papers that receive at least one patent citation, higher balance and higher disparity are associated with increased citation intensity, measured by the number of patent citations.
• The associations between interdisciplinarity and technological impact remain consistent across different citation window lengths.
• The findings suggest that while interdisciplinary research enhances technological impact, the nature of the interdisciplinarity—especially field distance—modulates this effect.