Why do Academic Scientists Engage in Interdisciplinary Research?φ

Work in progress- Comments welcome Abstract: This article provides a first empirical study of the de-terminants of the interdisciplinarity of academic researchers pro-duction. For that purpose we measure interdisciplinarity as the diversity of their research production across scientific domains. Our evidence is based on more than nine hundred permanent re-searchers employed by a large French university which is ranked first among French universities in terms of Impact. Our main re-sults are that the traditional academic career incentives do not stimulate interdisciplinary research while having connections with industry does. The context of work in the laboratory strongly af-fects the propensity to undertake interdisciplinary research