Exploring the role of interdisciplinarity in physics: Success, talent and luck

Although interdisciplinarity is often touted as a necessity for modern research, the evidence on the relative impact of sectorial versus to interdisciplinary science is qualitative at best. In this paper we leverage the bibliographic data set of the American Physical Society to quantify the role of interdisciplinarity in physics, and that of talent and luck in achieving success in scientific careers. We analyze a period of 30 years (1980-2009) tagging papers and their authors by means of the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS), to show that some degree of interdisciplinarity is quite helpful to reach success, measured as a proxy of either the number of articles or the citations score. We also propose an agent-based model of the publication-reputation-citation dynamics which reproduces the trends observed in the APS data set. On the one hand, the results highlight the crucial role of randomness and serendipity in real scientific research; on the other, they shed light on a counterintuitive effect indicating that the most talented authors are not necessarily the most successful ones.尽管跨学科研究常被奉为现代科研的必要之举，但有关单学科与跨学科科学的相对影响的实证依据，充其量仅能达到定性层面。本文依托美国物理学会（American Physical Society, APS）的文献数据集，量化分析了物理学领域跨学科研究的作用，以及科研生涯中天赋与运气对学术成功的影响。我们以1980—2009年这30年的时段为研究范围，通过物理与天文学分类法（Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme, PACS）对论文及其作者进行标注，结果显示：一定程度的跨学科研究对取得学术成功颇具助益——此处的学术成功以论文产出量或引用得分作为替代衡量指标。我们还提出了一个基于智能体的（agent-based）发表-声望-引用动态模型，该模型能够复现APS数据集所观测到的变化趋势。一方面，研究结果凸显了随机性与意外机遇在真实科研活动中的关键作用；另一方面，它们揭示了一个反直觉的现象：天赋最高的研究者未必是最成功的研究者。