Abstract
Interdisciplinary research (IDR) has the potential to address complex contemporary challenges by integrating insights from diverse disciplines. Previous literature has suggested that a key determinant of interdisciplinary research is collaboration between researchers. However, empirical studies have not resulted in a rich or coherent understanding of the relevance of collaboration in IDR. The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between collaboration and interdisciplinary research. We develop and test various hypotheses on the relationship between the interdisciplinarity of a published paper and various aspects of its author team, such as its size and its disciplinary diversity. Our findings, based on our institution’s record of publications, do not lend support to the commonly held belief that larger author teams tend to produce more interdisciplinary outputs. Likewise, counting the disciplines represented in author teams, or counting the disciplines ever published in by these members produce relatively weak predictors of IDR. The strongest predictors of IDR, in our analysis, is having a diverse knowledge base given the authors’ past publications, along with having a track records of publishing IDR. While associative, these findings suggest that the circumstances in which collaboration leads to interdisciplinary research are more limiting than previously thought.