ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
The value of interdisciplinary exposure: how university disciplinary diversity shapes research productivity of PhD students.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Purpose: PhD students at different universities face varying opportunities for interdisciplinary exposure, which may influence their academic performance. This study empirically investigates how university disciplinary diversity, which creates a context for the sharing and transfer of interdisciplinary knowledge, is associated with PhD student research productivity. Methods: This study proposes a novel measure of university-level disciplinary diversity and employs Poisson regression to examine its impact on PhD students' research productivity, controlling for a range of individual-, supervisor-, and institution-level factors, based on a sample of 1,418 accounting dissertations submitted to Chinese universities between 1999 and 2022. Results: While a linear model points to an aggregate negative effect of university disciplinary diversity on PhD students' research productivity, detailed analyses reveal a more nuanced inverted U-shaped relationship, suggesting that moderate levels of disciplinary diversity facilitate research productivity, and that the optimal level of diversity increases with a university's overall resources. Further analyses uncover that the negative effect is concentrated in universities with greater disciplinary imbalance or those that expand into too many irrelevant disciplines. Additionally, evidence indicates that PhD students at universities with higher disciplinary diversity are more likely to engage in interdisciplinary research and produce work with greater impact. Discussion: This study sheds new light on how interdisciplinary exposure is associated with PhD students' research productivity and offers practical implications for doctoral training. Engaging with interdisciplinary knowledge may help students identify innovative research questions and produce novel insights, underscoring the value of maintaining adequate disciplinary diversity at the university level.
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