Few research fields play major role in interdisciplinary grant success

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research is vital in addressing complex real-world problems. To understand how the scientific workforce is being engaged in the interdisciplinary research, it is important to track the involvement of different research fields over time and the grants that drive the research endeavour. Unfortunately, there has been very little work in this understanding of interdisciplinary research and grant success. In this paper, we analysed the contribution of different disciplines within multidisciplinary research that secured grants. We tracked these contributions over a 10-year period to understand how different research fields evolved over time and played roles in interdisciplinary grant success. We followed a basic statistical approach and proposed a network-based approach to understand relative participation of different disciplines. We found disparities within different disciplines which showed that only few research fields contributed more in the interdisciplinary research grant success.