Interdisciplinary research (IDR) has been considered as an important source for scientific breakthroughs and as a solution to today's complex societal challenges. While ample empirical evidence has suggested its benefits within the academia such as better creativity and higher scientific impact and visibility, its societal benefits -- a key argument originally used for promoting IDR -- remain relatively unexplored. Here, we study one aspect of societal benefits, that is contributing to the development of patented technologies, and examine how IDR papers are referenced as "prior art" by patents over time. We draw on a large sample of biomedical papers published in 23 years and measure the degree of interdisciplinarity of a paper using three popular indicators, namely variety, balance, and disparity. We find that papers that cites more fields (variety) and whose distributions over those cited fields are more even (balance) are more likely to receive patent citations, but both effects can be offset if papers draw upon more distant fields (disparity). These associations are consistent across different citation-window lengths. We further find that conditional on receiving patent citations, the intensity of their technological impact, as measured as both raw and quality-adjusted number of citing patents, increases with balance and disparity. Our work may have policy implications for interdisciplinary research and scientific and technological impact.
翻译:跨学科研究被认为是科学突破的重要来源,也是当今复杂社会挑战的一种解决办法。尽管大量经验证据表明,它有益于学术界,例如更富有的创造力和更高的科学影响和可见度,但其社会效益 -- -- 最初用于促进综合研究的关键论点 -- -- 仍然相对没有探讨。在这里,我们研究社会效益的一个方面,它有助于专利技术的发展,并研究长期专利将综合研究论文称为“主要艺术”的问题。我们利用23年来出版的大量生物医学论文样本,用三种流行指标,即多样性、平衡和差异衡量论文的异性程度。我们发现,那些提到更多领域(不同)及其在上述领域的分布更加均衡(平衡)的文件更有可能得到专利引用,但如果论文利用更遥远的领域(差异),这些联系就会被抵消。这些联系在不同引证-后方长度之间是一致的。我们进一步发现,以专利引用为条件的专利引用、其技术影响的强度,作为原始和质量平衡的衡量标准,以及我们科技研究中的差异,以及科技研究中的差异可能与科技影响。