Liang Hu, Win-bin Huang, and Yi Bu, based on their research in research papers on COVID-19, found that more interdisciplinary research is more relevant and cited more often in policy documents. I discovered that.
Interdisciplinary research is increasingly seen as a solution to today’s complex scientific and social problems. In recent decades, governments and public funding agencies have frequently asked scientists at universities and public research institutions to demonstrate the scientific and societal impact of the research they fund. Much research has been conducted on how interdisciplinary research, which combines different fields of knowledge, fosters unique ideas, and leads to major advances in science, attracts the attention of the scientific community and society. However, it is still unclear how much attention this type of research receives from policy makers. Our study aimed to examine whether interdisciplinary research attracts more attention to policy documents compared to research focused on a single field. In short, we argue that interdisciplinary research is more likely to receive attention in policy documents and thus influence policy decisions.
This study used data on scientific publications related to COVID-19 to investigate the relationship between their interdisciplinarity and policy attention. Our empirical data comes from OpenAlex, a new fully open scientific knowledge graph that replaces the deprecated Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), and the policy document database Overton. These scientific publications come from a total of 19 disciplines. However, because the distribution of publications in these fields is very uneven (as shown in Figure 1A), we grouped them into five main categories (as shown in the inner plot of Figure 1A ).
First, we categorized publications based on their level of interdisciplinarity and compared how policy attention varied by these levels. As shown in Figures 1B and 1C, in most fields, publications with a high degree of interdisciplinarity are more likely to attract policy attention. This finding provides a first insight into the relationship between interdisciplinarity and policy interest. Next, we conducted a regression analysis of the relationship between interdisciplinarity and policy attention. The regression results shown in Figure 2 also show that there is a positive correlation between interdisciplinarity and policy citations in almost all fields. As a reliability check, we used different indicators to measure interdisciplinarity and tried different regression methods.
Figure 1: The distribution of publications and policy citations changes in response to changes in interdisciplinarity across different fields.
Figure 2: Regression coefficients across different disciplines.
Given the importance of interdisciplinary research, it is important to consider what kind of attention it receives from policy documents. The attention from policy documents indicates that this research has the potential to influence policy development and implementation, effectively turning scientific findings into policy outcomes. Our findings highlight this transformation process, which involves evaluating and validating research findings and translating them into policy recommendations, guidelines, regulations, or practical applications that may benefit society. Masu.
This alignment of scientific research and society’s needs not only increases the social impact and value of science, but also makes full use of research results to promote social and economic development and foster technological innovation. , which also leads to the advancement of society as a whole.
Our findings show a positive correlation between the interdisciplinarity of scientific publications and the attention they receive from policy documents in almost all disciplines. More specifically, the more interdisciplinary a scientific publication is, the greater its ability to attract attention from policy documents. More simply, interdisciplinarity serves to facilitate the translation of scientific research into concrete policy outcomes, providing useful insights for researchers and policy makers.
This post cites the author’s article, “Interdisciplinary research receives significant attention from policy documents: Evidence from COVID-19,” published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
The content generated on this blog is for informational purposes only. This article provides the views and opinions of the author and does not necessarily reflect those of the Impact of Social Science Blog (Blog) or the London School of Economics and Political Science. If you have concerns about posting a comment, please review our comment policy below.
Image credit: Trapezondal from Shutterstock.
