Is multidisciplinary research more highly cited? A macro-level study

[Jonathan Levitt and Mike Thelwall]

Levitt, J.M. and Thelwall, M. (2008). Is multidisciplinary research more 
highly cited? A macro-level study. Journal of the American Society for 
Information Science and Technology, 59(12), 1973-1984.

Inter-disciplinary collaboration is a major goal in research policy. This 
study uses citation analysis to examine diverse subjects in the Web of 
Science and Scopus to ascertain whether, in general, research published in 
journals classified in more than one subject is more highly cited than 
research published in journals classified in a single subject. For each 
subject the study divides the journals into two disjoint sets called Multi 
and Mono: Multi consists of all journals in the subject and at least one 
other subject, whereas Mono consists of all journals in the subject and in 
no other subject. The main findings are: (a) For social science subject 
categories in both the Web of Science and Scopus, the average citation 
levels of articles in Mono and Multi are very similar, and (b) For Scopus 
subject categories within Life Sciences, Health Sciences, and Physical 
Sciences, the average citation level of Mono articles is roughly twice that 
of Multi articles. Hence one cannot assume that, in general, multi-
disciplinary research will be more highly cited, and the converse is 
probably true for many areas of science. A policy implication is that, at 
least in the sciences, multi-disciplinary researchers should not be 
evaluated by citations on the same basis as mono-disciplinary researchers.

Reported in the Times Higher Education (REF could penalise those working 
across disciplines, 
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?
sectioncode=26&storycode=403796&c=2)

Jonathan Levitt and Mike Thelwall