How do researchers collaborate across disciplines? Patterns of interdisciplinary collaboration based on disciplinary and contributory perspectives

While interdisciplinary collaboration is crucial to promote innovation, how researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds collaborate has not been comprehensively examined. This study proposes a dual-perspective framework based on authors’ disciplines and their contributions in research to categorise different interdisciplinary collaboration patterns (ICPs). Analysing 20,542 research articles from PLoS-series journals, three ICPs are identified. In the first pattern, authors possess disciplinary backgrounds primarily centred around biology, medicine and related disciplines and undertake various tasks jointly. In the second pattern, authors possess disciplinary backgrounds similar to those of the first pattern but divide their labour more specifically with each assuming distinct tasks. In the third pattern, authors exhibit diverse disciplinary backgrounds and collaboratively undertake different types of tasks. Results show that the second pattern enhances the disruptive nature of outputs but impairs their impact beyond academia, while the third pattern facilitates the interdisciplinary nature of outputs and their impact across disciplines.