Interdisciplinary research has emerged as a hotbed for innovation and a key approach to addressing complex societal challenges. The increasing dominance of grant-supported research in shaping scientific advances, coupled with growing interest in funding interdisciplinary work, raises fundamental questions about the effectiveness of interdisciplinary grants in fostering high-impact interdisciplinary research outcomes. Here, we quantify the interdisciplinarity of both research grants and publications, capturing 350,000 grants from 164 funding agencies across 26 countries and 1.3 million papers that acknowledged their support from 1985 to 2009. Our analysis uncovers two seemingly contradictory patterns: Interdisciplinary grants tend to produce interdisciplinary papers, which are generally associated with high impact. However, compared to disciplinary grants, interdisciplinary grants on average yield fewer papers and interdisciplinary papers they support tend to have substantially reduced impact. We demonstrate that the key to explaining this paradox lies in the power of disciplinary grants in propelling high-impact interdisciplinary research. Specifically, our results show that highly interdisciplinary papers supported by deeply disciplinary grants garner disproportionately more citations, both within their core disciplines and from broader fields. Moreover, disciplinary grants, particularly when combined with other similar grants, are more effective in producing high-impact interdisciplinary research. Amidst the rapid rise of support for interdisciplinary work across the sciences, these results highlight the hitherto unknown role of disciplinary grants in driving crucial interdisciplinary advances, suggesting that interdisciplinary research requires deep disciplinary expertise and investments.

翻译：跨学科研究已成为创新的温床和应对复杂社会挑战的关键途径。随着受资助研究在推动科学进步中日益占据主导地位，以及对跨学科工作资助兴趣的持续增长，关于跨学科资助在促进高影响力跨学科研究成果方面的有效性引发了根本性问题。本研究量化了研究资助与研究论文的跨学科性，涵盖1985年至2009年间26个国家164个资助机构的35万项资助项目及其支持的130万篇致谢论文。分析揭示出两种看似矛盾的模式：跨学科资助倾向于产出跨学科论文，且这类论文通常与高影响力相关。然而，与学科资助相比，跨学科资助平均产出的论文数量更少，且其支持的跨学科论文影响力显著降低。我们证明解释这一悖论的关键在于学科资助推动高影响力跨学科研究的能力。具体而言，研究结果显示，由深度学科资助支持的高跨学科论文在核心学科领域及更广泛的学术领域均获得不成比例的更高引用量。此外，学科资助（尤其是与其他同类资助结合时）在产出高影响力跨学科研究方面更为有效。在整个科学界对跨学科工作支持快速增长的大背景下，这些结果凸显了学科资助在驱动关键跨学科进展中此前未被认知的作用，表明跨学科研究需要深厚的学科专长与持续投入。