Purpose: Interdisciplinary fields have become the driving force of modern science and a significant source of scientific innovation. However, there is still a paucity of analysis about the essential characteristics of disciplines’ cross-disciplinary impact.Design/methodology/approach: In this study, we define cross-disciplinary impact on one discipline as its impact to other disciplines, and refer to a three-dimensional framework of variety-balance-disparity to characterize the structure of cross-disciplinary impact. The variety of cross-disci...
