Huo Chaoguang, Wang Xiaoyu, Dan Tingting, Liang Guoqiang, Zhu Zhenyuan
[Purpose/significance] Interdisciplinarity plays an important role in the discovery of significant scientific innovations. Exploring the patterns of scholarly interdisciplinarity,especially comparing the differences among schol⁃ars of various disciplines between China and America, holds substantial reference value for the advancement of interdis⁃ciplinary research and management in China. [Method/process] This paper does not forcibly classify scholars into a specific discipline, but only considers the disciplines they are involved in. Taking the scientific paper data of Chinese and American scholars in Scopus database as an example, it constructs three measurement indexes of variety of scholar interdisciplinarity, balance of scholar interdisciplinarity and specialization index. This paper then respectively extracts the scientific research outputs of 4.37 million Chinese scholars and 2.86 million American scholars,and measures and dynamically analyzes the scholar′s interdisciplinarity of the two countries over the past decade. [Result/conclusion]
The study shows that: (1) overall, Chinese scholars outperform American scholars in terms of variety and balance of scholar interdisciplinarity, especially in the core and top scholar groups; (2) Chinese disciplinary fields are generally in the stage of rapid development, whereas most of them are in the stage of stabilization in America, which makes Chinese scholars show wider participation and integration in interdisciplinary research, whereas American scholars show a heightened degree of specialization; (3) moreover, there are significant differences among scholars in various disci⁃plines when it comes to interdisciplinary research. In the fields of social sciences and medicine, Chinese scholars tend to engage more in interdisciplinary collaboration compared to their American counterparts. However, in engineering fields such as computer science, chemistry, and materials science, American scholars are involved in a wider range of disciplines. The research results provide valuable insights for guiding the management of interdisciplinary research inChina.