Some studies have shown that women undertake interdisciplinary research more than men, whereas other studies have shown no difference by gender. Women have also been shown to self-cite less often than men, a difference at least partly mediated through differences in career stages and prior productivity. Existing evidence on gender-based differences in interdisciplinarity may therefore be biased. If interdisciplinarity is inferred from the disciplinary diversity of a paper’s cited references, a greater share of self-citations by men could decrease their measured interdisciplinarity relative to women. Such biases could lead to erroneous conclusions, because after correcting for self-citations one might uncover that women participate in interdisciplinary research equally to, or less than, men. Given that funding for interdisciplinary research is gaining in importance, obtaining accurate measurements of interdisciplinarity by gender is highly relevant for funders so that they can take appropriate action(s) in leveling the playing field across gender. For instance, evidence suggests women are sometimes advised not to participate in interdisciplinary research due to the risk it represents for their career progression. This study shows that a paper’s interdisciplinarity increases with the presence of female authors, accounting or not for self-citations in the interdisciplinarity measurement.

Cross-disciplinary research (multi-/interdisciplinarity) is incentivized by funding agencies to foster research outcomes addressing complex societal challenges. This study focuses on the link between cross-disciplinary research and its uptake in a broad set of policy-related documents. Using the new policy-oriented database Overton, matched to Scopus, logistic regression was used in assessing this relationship in publications from FP7- and H2020-supported projects. Cross-disciplinary research was captured through two lenses at the paper level, namely from the disciplinary diversity of contributing authors (DDA) and of cited references (DDR). DDA increased the likelihood that publications were cited in policy documents, with DDR possibly making a contribution, but only when publications result from the work of few authors. Citations to publications captured by Overton were found to originate in scientific advice documents, rather than in legislative or executive records. Our approach enables testing in a general way the assumption underlying many funding programs, namely that cross-disciplinary research will increase the policy relevance of research outcomes. Findings suggest that research assessments could benefit from measuring uptake in policy-related literature, following additional characterization of the Overton database; of the science-policy interactions it captures; and of the contribution of these interactions within the larger policymaking process.