Mapping interdisciplinary knowledge production from the NSF ADVANCE program

Interdisciplinary knowledge production is a key desired outcome of work funded by the NSF. But how interdisciplinary is the published research? And how is this interdisciplinarity influenced by collaboration patterns? We explore two key aspects of interdisciplinarity in the published knowledge the NSF ADVANCE program has produced since 2001: First: to visualize the co-authorship networks of publications of ADVANCE award institutions we have created an online interactive network that allows users to explore ADVANCE co-authorships over the last two decades. Second, we quantify interdisciplinarity using three measures that capture the diversity of disciplines within a publication’s 1) references, 2) citations, and 3) authors’ expertise. We find that, in the case of ADVANCE, the extent to which co-author teams are interdisciplinary does not impact how interdisciplinary the references or citations are. However, within the ADVANCE network, we do find significant mixing of references between sociology and psychology, and substantial interdisciplinary impact outside of these fields (much more than observed for the fields on average). Importantly, the amount of interdisciplinarity is also a statistically significant predictor of the number of citations an ADVANCE outcome publication receives. Taken together, this work highlights the extent and benefits of interdisciplinary research for ADVANCE knowledge production. Please visit the Website for more information.