Interdisciplinary research and technological impact
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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.
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