Interdisciplinary papers supported by disciplinary grants garner deep and broad scientific impact

Interdisciplinary research has emerged as a hotbed for innovation and a key approach to addressing complex societal challenges. The dominance of grant-supported research in shaping scientific advances, coupled with growing interest in funding interdisciplinary work, raises fundamental questions about the effectiveness of interdisciplinary grants in fostering high-impact interdisciplinary research outcomes. Here, we analyze 350,000 grants from 164 agencies in 26 countries, along with 1.3 million resulting papers published between 1985 and 2009, to examine whether interdisciplinary grants successfully cultivate high-impact interdisciplinary research. Although interdisciplinary grants tend to produce interdisciplinary papers as intended, they yield fewer papers on average. Furthermore, while interdisciplinary papers are generally associated with high impact, those supported by interdisciplinary grants show substantially lower impact compared with those funded by disciplinary grants. In contrast, highly interdisciplinary papers anchored in deeply disciplinary grants garner disproportionately more citations, both within their core disciplines and from broader fields. This impact advantage is not merely a consequence of funding size, reception of ideas within disciplinary boundaries, or collaborative formats. Amid the substantial rise of support for interdisciplinary work across the sciences, these results highlight the underexplored role of disciplinary grants in driving interdisciplinary advances, suggesting that interdisciplinary research may benefit from deep disciplinary expertise and investments.