Interdisciplinary research (“IDR”) is often trumpeted as
essential for scientific and technological advancement. However,
interdisciplinarity is an ambiguous and multidimensional
concept: there are several legitimate perspectives on how to
track it --and a lack of consensus on which are the most
appropriate. This website offers a novel tool, the overlay maps
of science, as a method to explore the degree of
interdisciplinarity of a set of publications. The overlay
technique visualizes the spread of publications over the global
map of science, i.e. the structure of science as obtained from
the analysis of cross-citations between disciplines. The
analysis can be carried out at different units of aggregation:
for example for a university or corporation, for a research
topic, or for a research programme or funding agency. By
locating the publications over the map of science, one can gain
an understanding of the diversity of disciplines involved. Since
attribution of publications to disciplines is problematic and c