7.1.6The (citation) impact of interdisciplinarity

A further important aspect emerged in the literature. As interdisciplinary research implies the integration of knowledge from different disciplines, notably if associated with intense collaboration and the integration of a broader knowledge base, this may potentially open research to a larger user community. Several studies point to different forms of impact in connection with interdisciplinarity (cf. Molas-Gallart et al., 2014), but the results are not unambiguous (Abramo et al, 2017; Wang et al., 2015). Indeed, recent results of research conducted at ECOOM (cf. Glänzel and Debackere, 2021) show that citation impact and the two interdisciplinarity indexes as operationalized by CSS classes are very weakly correlated, practically almost uncorrelated. This implies that the three indicators (variety-disparity-citation impact) are complementing each other so that we can state that this indicator-triplet has the potential to provide a publications set’s unique interdisciplinarity profile.