title: Long-distance interdisciplinarity leads to higher scientific impact.
abstract: Scholarly collaborations across disparate scientific disciplines are challenging. Collaborators are likely to have their offices in another building, attend different conferences, and publish in other venues; they might speak a different scientific language and value an alien scientific culture. This paper presents a detailed analysis of success and failure of interdisciplinary papers--as manifested in the citations they receive. For 9.2 million interdisciplinary research papers published between 2000 and 2012 we show that the majority (69.9%) of co-cited interdisciplinary pairs are "win-win" relationships, i.e., papers that cite them have higher citation impact and there are as few as 3.3% "lose-lose" relationships. Papers citing references from subdisciplines positioned far apart (in the conceptual space of the UCSD map of science) attract the highest relative citation counts. The findings support the assumption that interdisciplinary research is more successful and leads to results greater than the sum of its disciplinary parts.
authors.affiliation: École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada; Observatoire des sciences et des technologies, Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Canada.
authors.forename: Vincent
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Larivière
authors.affiliation: École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada.
authors.forename: Stefanie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Haustein
authors.affiliation: Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center, School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America.
authors.forename: Katy
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Börner
mesh_terms: D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D058025:Interdisciplinary Studies / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D055811:Journal Impact Factor; D012586:Science / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*
references.citation: PLoS One. 2012;7(7):e39464
references.pmid: 22808037
references.citation: Science. 2013 Oct 25;342(6157):468-72
references.pmid: 24159044