Interdisciplinary research has emerged as a hotbed for innovation and discoveries. The increasing dominance of grant-supported research, combined with growing interest in funding interdisciplinary work, raises fundamental questions on the role of interdisciplinary grants in supporting high-impact interdisciplinary advances. Here we develop a measurement framework to quantify the interdisciplinarity of both research grants and publications and apply it to 350K grants from 164 funding agencies over 26 countries and 1.3M papers that acknowledged the support of these grants from 1985 to 2009. Our analysis uncovers two contradictory patterns. On the one hand, interdisciplinary grants tend to produce interdisciplinary papers and interdisciplinary papers are associated with high impact. On the other hand, compared to their disciplinary counterparts, interdisciplinary grants produce much fewer papers and interdisciplinary papers that they support have substantially reduced impact. We show that the key to resolving this discrepancy lies in the power of disciplinary grants: Highly interdisciplinary papers supported by deeply disciplinary grants garner disproportionately high impacts from both core disciplines and broader fields. Further, the broad and deep impacts of disciplinary grants are not simply due to funding size, reception of ideas within disciplinary boundaries, or collaborative formats. When it comes to producing key interdisciplinary advances, disciplinary grants appear to do more with less and seem especially powerful when paired with other similar disciplinary grants. Amidst the rapid rise of support for interdisciplinary work across the sciences, these results highlight the underexplored role of disciplinary grants in driving crucial interdisciplinary advances, suggesting that interdisciplinary research is a risky endeavor and requires deep disciplinary expertise and investments.

翻译：跨学科研究已成为创新与发现的温床。受资助研究日益占据主导地位，加之对跨学科工作资助兴趣的持续增长，引发了关于跨学科资助在推动高影响力跨学科突破中作用的根本性问题。我们建立了一个测量框架，用于量化研究资助与出版物的跨学科性，并将其应用于1985年至2009年间来自26个国家164家资助机构的35万项资助项目，以及这些资助项目支持下的130万篇致谢论文。分析揭示了两组矛盾现象：一方面，跨学科资助倾向于产出跨学科论文，而跨学科论文本身具有高影响力；另一方面，与学科资助相比，跨学科资助产出的论文数量明显更少，且其支持的跨学科论文影响力显著降低。研究表明，解决这一矛盾的关键在于学科资助的强大力量：受深度学科资助的高度跨学科论文，从核心学科和更广泛领域获得了超比例的高影响力。进一步分析表明，学科资助的广泛深远影响并非仅源于资助规模、学科边界内的思想接受度或合作形式。在产生关键跨学科突破方面，学科资助能以更少资源实现更大成效，尤其与其他同类学科资助协同作用时效果显著。在科学界对跨学科工作支持迅猛增长的背景下，这些发现凸显了学科资助在推动关键跨学科突破中尚未被充分发掘的作用，表明跨学科研究是高风险探索，需要深厚的学科专业知识与持续投入。