Interdisciplinary research and the societal visibility of science: The advantages of spanning multiple and distant scientific fields D’Este, Pablo Robinson García, Nicolás Interdisciplinary research Societal visibility Altmetrics Academic engagement Science - society interactions Scientific impact Acknowledgements The authors thank editor Ben Martin and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. The authors are also grateful to the valuable feedback received by Andrés Barge-Gil, Nicolas Carayol, Elena Cefis, Adrián A. Díaz-Faes, Jarno Hoekman, Cornelia Lawson, Óscar Llopis, Orietta Marsili, Francesco Rentocchini, Ammon Salter, and participants in the following workshops and conferences: CREI Ideas Development Workshop (Univ. of Bath, 2021), DRUID (2021), Academy of Management (2021), EU-SPRI (2021) and the Workshop on the Organisation, Economics, and Policy of Scientific Research (WOEPSR, 2022). The authors acknowledge funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (CSO2013-48053-R); Nicolás Robinson-García is currently supported by a Ramón y Cajal grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science (RYC2019-027886-I). The usual disclaimers apply. Science policy discourse often encourages interdisciplinary research as an approach that enhances the potential of science to produce breakthrough discoveries and solutions to real-world, complex problems. While there is a large body of research examining the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific discovery, there is comparatively limited evidence on and understanding of the connection between interdisciplinarity and the generation of scientific findings that address societal problems. Drawing on a large-scale survey, we investigate whether scientists who conduct interdisciplinary research are more likely to generate scientific findings with high societal visibility - that is, research findings that attract the attention of non-academic audiences, as measured by mentions to scientific articles in blogs, news media and policy documents. Our findings provide support for the idea that two facets of interdisciplinarity - variety and disparity - are associated positively with societal visibility. Our results show, also, that the interplay between these two facets of interdisciplinarity has a systematic positive and significant association with societal visibility, suggesting a reinforcing effect of spanning multiple and distant scientific fields. Finally, we find support for the contingent role of scientists' collaboration with non-academic actors, suggesting that the positive association between interdisciplinary research and societal visibility is particularly strong among scientists who collaborate with actors outside academia. We argue that this study provides useful insights for science policy oriented to fostering the scientific and societal relevance of publicly funded research. 2022-12-16T10:09:26Z 2022-12-16T10:09:26Z 2022-11-29 journal article P. D’Este and N. Interdisciplinary research and the societal visibility of science: The advantages of spanning multiple and distant scientific fields. Robinson-García. Research Policy 52 (2023) 104609 [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2022.104609] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/78500 10.1016/j.respol.2022.104609 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Elsevier