An exploratory study of interdisciplinarity and breakthrough ideas

Interdisciplinary research, defined as work which combines theories, methods, tools and concepts from multiple specialized knowledgebases, is often treated as proxy for research which is likely to be “transformative.” This treatment presumes that the novel combination of ideas from multiple disciplines has a high probability of generating "breakthrough" insights, which in turn will lead to significant discoveries and innovations. We conduct an exploratory study to understand how to measure the degree of interdisciplinarity involved in novel, significant research fields, and how those measures capture the integration of disparate ideas in novel configurations. Our approach is to examine research fields recognized as “breakthroughs” in their domains, such as tissue engineering and DNA microarrays, and “measure” the interdisciplinarity of the ideas embedded in those research areas in three ways: the Porter-Rafols integration score, a measure of the “topical diversity” of the papers using the method proposed by Newman et al., and hand-coded assessments by informed human reviewers. The results provide promising into the relative capabilities of bibliometrics and text analytics for assessing interdisciplinarity, and also examine more closely whether the characteristics of interdisciplinary research make that research more likely to produce scientific and technical breakthroughs.