Interdisciplinarity: A Nobel Opportunity

Abstract

Interdisciplinary collaborations now sweep most fields of the natural and life sciences, necessary to tackle the world's most challenging problems. Yet, the scientific enterprise continues to be dominated by old stereotypes: Interdisciplinary science is less likely to receive funding and is discriminated at institutional levels. Ample solutions for funders, institutions and publishers have been suggested, but the most visible form of scientific credit has so far been ignored: How interdisciplinary is our award system? To address this question, we explore interdisciplinarity in the most prestigious award in science, the Nobel Prize. We document a tendency of Nobel Prizes to neglect interdisciplinary discoveries, especially between physics and the life sciences. Given the increased growth of interdisciplinary high-impact research over the last three decades, we have reached the critical point in time where the issue of recognizing outstanding interdisciplinary research has become truly pressing.

arXiv commentpre-peer-reviewed version of the Nature Physics perspective

References in corpus (5)

• Quantifying Long-Term Scientific Impact
• The Matthew effect in empirical data
• Collective credit allocation in science
• How citation boosts promote scientific paradigm shifts and Nobel Prizes
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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Taking census of physics
• Exploration of an Interdisciplinary Scientific Landscape
• Science and Technology Advance through Surprise
• Correspondence between temporal correlations in time series, inverse problems, and the Spherical Model
• Interdisciplinary researchers attain better performance in funding
• The geography of novel and atypical research
• Mapping the changing structure of science through diachronic periodical embeddings
• The Social Abduction of Science