Delayed Impact of Interdisciplinary Research

Abstract Interdisciplinary research increasingly fuels innovation, and is a key input for future breakthroughs. Yet when does interdisciplinary research achieve its major impact remains unclear. Here, we use the time of a paper to reach its citation peak to quantify citation dynamics, and examine its relationship with paper interdisciplinarity. Using large scale publication datasets spanning over 37 years, our results suggest that interdisciplinary papers show significant delayed impact both microscopically per paper and macroscopically collectively, as it takes longer time for interdisciplinary papers to reach their citation peak. Such relationships are nearly universal across various scientific disciplines. Furthermore, we study the underlying forces of such delayed impact, finding that the effect goes beyond the Matthew effect (i.e., the rich-get-richer effect). Finally, we find that team size and content conventionality cannot fully explain this effect. Overall, our results suggest that governments, research administrators, and funding agencies should be aware of this general feature of interdisciplinary science, which may have broad policy implications.