Assess the influence of COVID-19 on interdisciplinary research

Assess the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on interdisciplinary research (IDR) by analyzing publication and citation data beyond 2020 to determine how the pandemic affected patterns of interdisciplinary collaboration and citation exchanges across disciplines.

Background

The study analyzes 63,092,811 papers and 973,167,157 citations from Web of Science (1981–2020), introducing Critical Years for Interdisciplinary Citations (CYICs) to identify turning points in interdisciplinary research (IDR). It segments IDR development into three periods and highlights Medicine’s dominant role alongside rising contributions from Engineering and Environment.

Because the dataset ends in 2020, the authors explicitly note that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are not captured, leaving the impact of this global event on IDR unassessed. This creates a clear unresolved question requiring post-2020 data analyses to quantify pandemic-related changes in IDR.