This study analyzes the level of interdisciplinarity and interspecialty of highly cited papers. We distinguish research referring to different disciplines (referred to as “interdisciplinarity”) and research referring to different specialties of the same discipline (referred to as “interspecialty”). The results indicate that: (1) interspecialty research, has a greater impact on science development than intradisciplinary (or intraspecialty) research for most specialties and disciplines; (2) interdisciplinary research plays a more important role in Natural Sciences and Engineering than in Social Sciences and Humanities; and (3) interdisciplinary research is becoming more important in science either at the specialty or discipline level.
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Chen et al. (2014) studied this question.
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