Evaluating the impact of interdisciplinary research: A multilayer network approach

Nowadays, scientific challenges usually require approaches that cross traditional boundaries between academic disciplines, driving many researchers towards interdisciplinarity. Despite its obvious importance, there is a lack of studies on how to quantify the influence of interdisciplinarity on the research impact, posing uncertainty in a proper evaluation for hiring and funding purposes. Here we propose a method based on the analysis of bipartite interconnected multilayer networks of citations and disciplines, to assess scholars, institutions and countries interdisciplinary importance. Using data about physics publications and US patents, we show that our method allows to reveal, using a quantitative approach, that being more interdisciplinary causes – in the Granger sense – benefits in scientific productivity and impact. The proposed method could be used by funding agencies, universities and scientific policy decision makers for hiring and funding purposes, and to complement existing methods to rank universities and countries.