Interdisciplinary Papers Supported by Disciplinary Grants Garner Deep and Broad Scientific Impact

Interdisciplinary research has emerged as a hotbed for innovation and discoveries. The increasing dominance of grant-supported research, combined with growing interest in funding interdisciplinary work, raises fundamental questions on the role of interdisciplinary grants in supporting high-impact interdisciplinary advances. Here we develop a measurement framework to quantify the interdisciplinarity of both research grants and publications and apply it to 350K grants from 164 funding agencies over 26 countries and 1.3M papers that acknowledged the support of these grants from 1985 to 2009. Our analysis uncovers two contradictory patterns. On the one hand, interdisciplinary grants tend to produce interdisciplinary papers and interdisciplinary papers are associated with high impact. On the other hand, compared to their disciplinary counterparts, interdisciplinary grants produce much fewer papers and interdisciplinary papers that they support have substantially reduced impact. We show that the key to resolving this discrepancy lies in the power of disciplinary grants: Highly interdisciplinary papers supported by deeply disciplinary grants garner disproportionately high impacts from both core disciplines and broader fields. Further, the broad and deep impacts of disciplinary grants are not simply due to funding size, reception of ideas within disciplinary boundaries, or collaborative formats. When it comes to producing key interdisciplinary advances, disciplinary grants appear to do more with less and seem especially powerful when paired with other similar disciplinary grants. Amidst the rapid rise of support for interdisciplinary work across the sciences, these results highlight the underexplored role of disciplinary grants in driving crucial interdisciplinary advances, suggesting that interdisciplinary research is a risky endeavor and requires deep disciplinary expertise and investments.