It really has influence. I am going to tell you a story. I used to do research work but in a small group in an University in Venezuela, and beleive me I work a lot writting for almost 10 years, but I do not have any recognition in my field because usually was local studies and boring topics.

Now, I am working y collaboration with some other researchers in some highligted topics and guest what? It is resulting, my large experience in areas that I just know but I was not interested in publishing in (as scientific journals and publication process) is now my way to be known in the academic social network...

Dear Muthana Makki Mohammedali,

In my opinion, it is possible that in certain situations interdisciplinarity positively affects the visibility of published papers. This situation may occur in correlation with the following factors: a multi-person research team; individual members of the research team and authors of the published research work represent various research and scientific institutions and institutions, various universities operating in different countries; multi-authoring of publications; high level of significance of the problem described in the published text covering various fields of knowledge and various scientific disciplines.

Best regards,

Dariusz Prokopowicz

It really has influence. I am going to tell you a story. I used to do research work but in a small group in an University in Venezuela, and beleive me I work a lot writting for almost 10 years, but I do not have any recognition in my field because usually was local studies and boring topics.

Now, I am working y collaboration with some other researchers in some highligted topics and guest what? It is resulting, my large experience in areas that I just know but I was not interested in publishing in (as scientific journals and publication process) is now my way to be known in the academic social network...

Muthana - multi-disciplinarity also equates to multiple authorship. Each author hopefully promotes their work in each institution and wider. This has to be a positive outcome - assuming all authors do promote the findings as widely as possible. The more disciplines that are involved, the wider the findings influence, relevence and applicability is deemed to be.

Dean Whitehead, thanks! How about multi-disciplinarity by a single author? I assume that would reduce the influence as it would be a single institution by an author who presumably knows a lot about one discipline but is just an average reader of another.

How many disciplines do you think can be involved in a single project?! Not as many in humanities as in the sciences, I assume?

I love that you speak about influence, many colleagues write just to fill a gap in the literature regardless of its importance.

Wileidys Artigas , thanks for sharing your experience. This is inspiring!

Dariusz Prokopowicz , thanks! I can't agree more.

I agree with Dean Whitehead Position

Multidisciplinary, multi-professionalism, multiauthorship aids Research and knowledge spread

Both the two terms are often used interchangeably, also they have subtle differences. By solely referring to interdisciplinarity as it appears above, it requires different contributing authors to work collaboratively from various perspectives of all the disciplines involved to build a whole. By multidisciplinarity, we may simply refer to any study where the team works sequentially from individual perspectives and not necessary in the interest of synthetic approach or cohesive plan (as it appears for the former), rather it involves building individual plans. Whether intra-, cross-, multi-, inter-, trans- disciplinary, study shows that any research that involves more than one discipline brings about multiprofessional collaboration or team practice, which helps to solve more complex theories and advance the knowledge base. It also increases visibility/publicity of the outcome as it is most popularly known and attributed by benefit.

By collaboration if you mean the number of scholars who collaborated on the paper as coauthors, there are studies that found out that these papers get more citation (proxy for visibility). It is thought that more people are promoting the study, hence more citations.

As for interdisciplinarity, it is not that easy to say something about it as it is not easy to measure interdisciplinarity: the topic of the paper may be interdisciplinary, the couauthor team may have different backgrounds, the journal the study is published may be interdisciplinary etc. Each would require a different methodology to study.

Moreover, the visibility is a tricky concept. Take Wolfe-Simon et al.'s Arsenic based life article. It is interdisciplinary and visible (with hundreds of citations and 1138 altmetrics score); however, all of the citations are negative and criticize the study. Wolfe-Simon's career almost ended because of it. So what kind of visibility are you asking about.

In short, collaboration definitely helps with the visibility; interdisciplinary probably helps with with the visibility, but one needs to be careful with type of the visibility.

You may want to check studies on altmetrics for visibility as well.

Arsev Umur Aydinoglu, thanks for your insightful remarks! Your example of Wolfe-Simon et al's article is appalling! Here is a link on it from Wikipedia for anyone who would like to read about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felisa_Wolfe-Simon (It should be made a movie!) It's an undesirable case of visibility, which, as you suggest, calls for a reconsideration of using the term "visibility" in lieu of "citation".

Altmetrics is still to gain more popularity, I noticed that it's being criticized by senior scholars with a high traditional citation score.

Many thanks again, sir.

Inter-disciplinary research seems to be the right step forward as it enables research solutions from unexplored viewpoints and perspectives. For example medical imaging solves medical diagnosis problems using principles from image processing and pattern recognition domains.

It increases visibility by increased knowledge level and desemination of the published paper.