In April 7-8, 2022 Pablo D’Este, senior researcher at INGENIO (CSIC-UPV) will be presenting a joint study with Nicolas Robinson-Garcia in which they combine altmetric and bibliometric data with survey data at the WOEPSR 2022: Workshop on the Organisation, Economics, and Policy of Scientific Research 2022.

The abstract of the paper reads as follows:

Interdisciplinary research is often advocated in the science policy discourse as an approach to enhance the potential of science to produce breakthrough discoveries and solutions to complex real-world problems. While research examining the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific discoveries is abundant, there is comparatively limited evidence and understanding on the connection between interdisciplinarity and the generation of scientific findings that address societal problems. Drawing on a large-scale survey, we investigate whether scientists who conduct research involving team members with diverse scientific backgrounds are more likely to generate scientific findings with higher societal visibility – that is, research findings that have raised the attention of non-academic audiences, as measured by mentions to scientific articles in blogs, news media and policy briefs.We find strong evidence that two facets of interdisciplinarity – variety and disparity – have a positive association with societal visibility. Our results show, also, that the interplay between these two facets of interdisciplinarity has a systematic positive and significant association with societal visibility, suggesting a reinforcing effect between spanning multiple and distant scientific fields. Finally, we find preliminary support for a contingent role of scientists’ collaboration with non-academic actors, suggesting that the positive association between interdisciplinary research and societal visibility is particularly strong among scientists who collaborate with stakeholders. We argue that this study provides useful insights for science policy oriented to foster the scientific and societal relevance of publicly funded research.

This study is currently under review and we hope to share the final version once accepted.