Characterizing Interdisciplinarity of Nobel Laureates’ Key Publications

To know whether greater or smaller interdisciplinarity benefits high-quality scientific outputs, two indicators, the Brillouin’s (BI) and Hill-type (HI) indices, are applied to characterize interdisciplinarity of key publications of Nobel laureates from 2001 to 2010. Both BI and HI indicate that smaller interdisciplinarity benefits the creative works of these Nobel laureates. The results show high concordance between BI and HI, with high correlation (>0.8). Although all values, with BI < 1 and HI < 12, show that the interdisciplinarity is always small in the sample, the study also shows that interdisciplinary studies are more widely distributed in the field of physiology or medicine than that in physics.