论文标题
跨学科研究和技术影响：生物医学的证据
Interdisciplinary research and technological impact: Evidence from biomedicine
论文作者
论文摘要
跨学科研究（IDR）被认为是科学突破的重要来源，也是解决当今复杂社会挑战的解决方案。尽管充分的经验证据表明，其在学术界中的好处，例如更好的创造力，更高的科学影响和知名度，但其社会利益 - 最初用于促进IDR的关键论点 - 仍然相对尚未探索。在这里，我们研究了社会福利的一个方面，这是有助于专利技术的发展，并研究如何随着时间的推移将IDR论文称为“先前的艺术”。我们借鉴了23年内发表的大量生物医学论文样本，并使用三个流行的指标，即多样性，平衡和差异来衡量论文的跨学科性程度。我们发现，引用更多字段（品种）且在那些引用字段上的分布的论文更可能获得专利引用，但是如果论文借鉴了更遥远的字段（差异），则两种效果都可以抵消。这些关联在不同的引用窗口长度上是一致的。我们进一步发现，有条件获得专利引用的条件，其技术影响的强度（以原始和质量调整后的专利数量都衡量，都随着平衡和差异而增加。我们的工作可能对跨学科研究以及科学和技术影响具有政策影响。
Interdisciplinary research (IDR) has been considered as an important source for scientific breakthroughs and as a solution to today's complex societal challenges. While ample empirical evidence has suggested its benefits within the academia such as better creativity and higher scientific impact and visibility, its societal benefits -- a key argument originally used for promoting IDR -- remain relatively unexplored. Here, we study one aspect of societal benefits, that is contributing to the development of patented technologies, and examine how IDR papers are referenced as "prior art" by patents over time. We draw on a large sample of biomedical papers published in 23 years and measure the degree of interdisciplinarity of a paper using three popular indicators, namely variety, balance, and disparity. We find that papers that cites more fields (variety) and whose distributions over those cited fields are more even (balance) are more likely to receive patent citations, but both effects can be offset if papers draw upon more distant fields (disparity). These associations are consistent across different citation-window lengths. We further find that conditional on receiving patent citations, the intensity of their technological impact, as measured as both raw and quality-adjusted number of citing patents, increases with balance and disparity. Our work may have policy implications for interdisciplinary research and scientific and technological impact.
