Quantifying Interdisciplinarity in Scientific Articles Using Deep Learning Toward a TRIZ-Based Framework for Cross-Disciplinary Innovation

Nicolas Douard, Ahmed Samet, George Giakos, Denis Cavallucci

Interdisciplinary research (IDR) is essential for addressing complex global challenges that surpass the capabilities of any single discipline. However, measuring interdisciplinarity remains challenging due to conceptual ambiguities and inconsistent methodologies. To overcome these challenges, we propose a deep learning approach that quantifies interdisciplinarity in scientific articles through semantic analysis of titles and abstracts. Utilizing the Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus (S2ORC), we leveraged metadata field tags to categorize papers as either interdisciplinary or monodisciplinary, establishing the foundation for supervised learning in our model. Specifically, we preprocessed the textual data and employed a Text Convolutional Neural Network (Text CNN) architecture to identify semantic patterns indicative of interdisciplinarity. Our model achieved an F1 score of 0.82, surpassing baseline machine learning models. By directly analyzing semantic content and incorporating metadata for training, our method addresses the limitations of previous approaches that rely solely on bibliometric features such as citations and co-authorship. Furthermore, our large-scale analysis of 136 million abstracts revealed that approximately 25% of the literature within the specified disciplines is interdisciplinary. Additionally, we outline how our quantification method can be integrated into a TRIZ-based (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) methodological framework for cross-disciplinary innovation, providing a foundation for systematic knowledge transfer and inventive problem solving across domains. Overall, this approach not only offers a scalable measurement of interdisciplinarity but also contributes to a framework for facilitating innovation through structured cross-domain knowledge integration.