Evaluating Interdisciplinary Contributions to Synchrotron Radiation Studies: Scientometric Insights into Novelty and Disruption

Research infrastructures consisting of multiple experimental stations and functioning as large-scale scientific facilities are critical to advancing scientific understanding and addressing complex, interdisciplinary challenges. This study explores the relationship between the interdisciplinarity of these stations and the novelty and disruption of their academic outputs, using the US. Department of Energy's Advanced Photon Source (APS) as a case study. We analyzed 29,692 papers produced by 53 experimental stations of the APS from 1992 to 2020, each of which received more than five citations by 2023. The novelty of academic outputs was assessed using SciBERT to measure semantic similarities between titles within the citation network, while disruption was measured with a relative dependency index. Interdisciplinarity was quantified by variety, balance, disparity and interdisciplinary integration index. The results of the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression show a negative correlation between novelty and disciplinary disparity and a significant negative correlation between disruption and interdisciplinarity. These results suggest that interdisciplinary approaches promote the exchange of ideas and holistic understanding between disciplines, but that specialized expertise remains critical for groundbreaking research. This balance encourages further investigation to optimize the interplay between interdisciplinary collaboration and disciplinary specialization to drive scientific progress.