Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Science and Education Evaluation (CASEE) have embarked on a new study focusing on the social impact of interdisciplinary research. They partnered with Elsevier’s International Center for the Study of Research (ICSR) and its ICSR Lab for the research.

Professor Shiji Chen, who has been studying how interdisciplinary research influences science and society, and his colleagues hypothesised that because “interdisciplinary research is closely related to applied and societal problems that generally impact the general public, we thought it may receive more attention on social media than specialized research”.

Their findings, available as a preprint on SSRN, find that interdisciplinary work gets more attention on both Mendeley and Twitter, and that the attention received comes from both academic and non-academic communities.

Elsevier has written an extensive article about their research, which you can find here.