Drawing on a study of COVID-19 research papers, Liang Hu, Win-bin Huang and Yi Bu find more interdisciplinary research to have greater relevance and be more heavily cited in policy documents.
Interdisciplinary research is increasingly seen as a solution to today’s complex scientific and social problems. In recent decades, governments and public funding agencies have frequently required scientists at universities and public research institutions to demonstrate the scientific and social impact of funded research. Many studies have explored how interdisciplinary research, which combines different areas of knowledge, encourages unique ideas, and leads to major scientific breakthroughs, attracts attention from the scientific community and society. However, it’s still unclear the extent to which this type of research is noticed by policy-makers. Our study aimed to find out if interdisciplinary research gets more attention from policy documents compared to research focused on a single discipline. In short, we found that interdisciplinary research is more likely to attract attention in policy documents and hence we argue is more likely to influence policy-making.
In this study, we used data from scientific publications on COVID-19 to explore the relationship between their interdisciplinarity and the policy attention they receive. Our empirical data comes from OpenAlex, a new and fully-open scientific knowledge graph launched to replace the discontinued Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), and a policy document database, Overton. These scientific publications come from a total of nineteen disciplines. However, due to the highly uneven distribution of publications among these disciplines (as shown in Figure 1A), we have grouped them into five major categories (as shown in the inner plot of Fig.1A).
First, we categorised the publications based on their level of interdisciplinarity and compared how policy attention varies with these levels. In most fields, publications with higher interdisciplinarity are more likely to attract policy attention, as shown in Fig.1B and Fig.1C. This finding gives us an initial look at the connection between interdisciplinarity and policy attention. Secondly, we performed a regression analysis on the relationship between interdisciplinarity and policy attention. The regression results shown in Fig.2 also show that there is a positive correlation between interdisciplinarity and policy citation in almost all fields. As a reliability check, we also used different metrics to measure interdisciplinarity and tried various regression methods.
Fig.1: The distribution of publications and policy citations changes with variations in interdisciplinarity across different fields.
Fig.2: Coefficients of regressions across different fields.
Given the significant importance of interdisciplinary research, it is crucial to consider the attention it receives from policy documents. Attention from policy documents indicates that the research has the potential to influence policy formulation and implementation, effectively turning scientific findings into policy outcomes. Our findings highlight this transformation process, which includes assessing and validating research results, then converting them into policy recommendations, guidelines, regulations, or practical applications that potentially benefit society.
This alignment of scientific research with societal needs not only enhances the social impact and value of science, but also maximizes the use of research outcomes to drive social and economic development, promote technological innovation, and advance society as a whole.
Our findings indicate that there is a positive correlation between the interdisciplinarity of scientific publications and the attention they receive from policy documents in almost all fields. More specifically, the stronger the interdisciplinarity of scientific publication, the greater its ability to attract attention from policy documents. In simpler terms, interdisciplinarity plays a role in facilitating the translation of scientific research into tangible policy outcomes, which provides useful insights for researchers and policymakers.
This post draws on the authors’ article, Interdisciplinary research attracts greater attention from policy documents: Evidence from COVID-19, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
The content generated on this blog is for information purposes only. This Article gives the views and opinions of the authors and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Impact of Social Science blog (the blog), nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Please review our comments policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.
Image Credit: Trapezondal on Shutterstock.
