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Dynamics and characteristics of interdisciplinary research in scientific breakthroughs: case studies of Nobel-winning research in the past 120 years

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Abstract

This study explores the interdisciplinary dynamics and characteristics of major original scientific achievements. Based on the perspective of knowledge integration, it combines bibliometric and social network analysis to investigate key publications of Nobel-winning research in natural science and their reference data. The data cover 585 laureates in Chemistry, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine awarded between 1901 and 2020, as well as 835 key publications published between 1887 and 2012 and their 10,894 citation publications. The main findings are as follows: First, interdisciplinary knowledge integration is an essential feature of original scientific breakthroughs, although influential achievements typically result from a novel combination of a larger amount of distant knowledge but in fewer disciplines. Second, the development of various disciplines in natural science has followed different dynamics of interdisciplinary processes for more than 100 years. Chemistry and Physics have experienced a dynamic shift from centralization to decentralization in terms of the concentrated degree of integrated disciplines, while Physiology or Medicine has shown a more generally concentrated trend. Third, Nobel-winning research presents a trend of a greater degree of knowledge interconnection, and the migration of combined research methods, tools, and basic disciplines contributes to the increasingly intense structure of knowledge combination. Bridging disciplines that facilitate knowledge exchange have shifted in the knowledge network across three time periods (the 1900s–1940s, 1950s–1970s, and 1980s and beyond).

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Notes

  1. “Key Publications” and “Nobel-winning research” are interchangeable terms in this paper. Different expressions are used for clarification when necessary.

  2. In 1900s–‘40s, 8 of the 16 disciplines involved in the references were in the LS&BM field, and 1980s–, 15 of the 31 new disciplines were in the LS&BM field. This is in line with the increasing trend of the number of disciplines in the LS&BM field in WoS, reflected by the number of SCs for each publication.

  3. The data used in Larivière et al. (2010) covers publications from 1900 to 2004. Three sources are included: data from 1900 to 1944 are drawn from the Century of Science in Thomson Scientific, which indexes 266 distinct journal titles covering most natural sciences and medical fields; data from 1945 to 1979 are from the natural sciences, engineering, and medical journals in the WoS; data from 1980 to 2004 are from the Science Citation Index in the WoS. Their data do not include articles in the fields of arts and humanities or the social sciences. Larivière et al. (2010) then divided these data into two scientific fields: medical fields (MED) and natural sciences and engineering (NSE), and calculated the average references of articles for each. Based on their results, we calculated the average references of each field for the three time periods (1900–‘40s, 1950s–‘70s, and 1980s–). As Century Science and SCI are both part of WoS, their classification of disciplines is comparable to ours.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant number [L1924013] and [72274191]) and the Institutes of Science and Development, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant number [Y9X3581H]). The authors greatly appreciate the two anonymous referees for their thorough and insightful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Canvard College, Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Jingjing Ren

  2. Institutes of Science and Development, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhongguancun Beiyitiao 15, Beijing, 100190, People’s Republic of China

    Fang Wang

  3. Bureau of Policy, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Minglu Li

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Table 6 Discipline frequency of references of Nobel-winning research in three fields across three periods
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Table 7 Betweenness centrality of main disciplines in three fields across three periods
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Table 8 OLS regression results on diversity indicators in Chemistry
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Table 9 OLS regression results on diversity indicators in Physics
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Table 10 OLS regression results on diversity indicators in Physiology or Medicine
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Ren, J., Wang, F. & Li, M. Dynamics and characteristics of interdisciplinary research in scientific breakthroughs: case studies of Nobel-winning research in the past 120 years. Scientometrics 128, 4383–4419 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04762-x

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