Understanding the relationship between interdisciplinary knowledge and disruption in science

Interdisciplinary knowledge, representing an ex-ante perspective, amalgamates fresh insights from diverse domains, while disruption serves as a post hoc metric of innovation, gauging the capacity of scholarly endeavours to challenge entrenched scientific paradigms. We study the relationship between interdisciplinary knowledge and disruption, examining 38 million papers across all fields from 1960 to 2020. We find that interdisciplinarity has steadily increased, while disruption – measured by how much research challenges existing scientific paradigms – has been on the decline. Larger research teams tend to produce more interdisciplinary work but are less likely to make disruptive contributions. Nevertheless, there is a clear positive link between interdisciplinarity and the disruptive potential of research papers. We also show that the impact of interdisciplinarity on disruption has grown over time, with a stronger effect in STEM fields compared with social sciences and humanities. Larger research teams also have a greater effect on disruption than smaller teams. We further examine factors like team diversity, reference variety, and delayed citation recognition to explain how interdisciplinarity contributes to disruption. Overall, our findings highlight the important role of interdisciplinary knowledge in driving scientific innovation.