Based on the categorization of more than 35 million research papers into major disciplines by their journals of publication, and the proportion of references they cited from within or outside the same discipline, interdisciplinary research has been increasing since the mid-1980s. Three years following publication, the citation rates of articles decreased with the degree of their interdisciplinarity. However, 13 years after publication, papers with increasing interdisciplinarity are more frequently cited. Considering the fields that both the publications and article referenced and those that cited them, interdisciplinarity varied widely, with health at the high end and clinical medicine at the low end of the range. In 2013, the countries publishing the highest percentage of papers citing sources infrequently referenced together were India, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Brazil, and the countries that produced the most papers with references in other disciplines were China, India, Taiwan, Brazil and Australia.

Source: Nature