A framework for measuring the knowledge diffusion impact of interdisciplinary research

Due to the advantage of solving complex societal problems and generating meaningful innovations, interdisciplinary research (IDR) has attracted broad attention and extensive support from academia, industry, and government. Most of IDR studies, especially about the quantitative measurement of interdisciplinarity, focus on the perspective of integration. Although impact, as another critical dimension of IDR, has been discussed in recent years, most current studies focus on the impact within the academic research domain, e.g., productivity and citation. Exploring the dynamic evolution of knowledge diffusion, particularly across different disciplinary fields, helps our understanding of IDR and its impact. This paper proposed a novel conceptual framework to investigate the interdisciplinary impact in the broader sense of knowledge diffusion. Beyond the citation count, we care about the citing papers' disciplinary diversity and the cognitive distance between the source paper and citing papers.