Working together across disciplinary boundaries is considered to be the gold standard for conducting meaningful research tackling complex problems. As this is the nature of many issues concerning water, one would assume interdisciplinarity as being a widespread trait of water research. To review this assumption, we chose to conduct an analysis of research output considering issues of stormwater management and heavy precipitation, as reflected in the meta-information for more than 300,000 documents supplied by Elsevier’s Scopus literature database. For this purpose, we applied a bibliometric measure based on Jaccard similarity determining the level of interdisciplinary cooperation between different fields of research on the topic above. Contrary to interdisciplinarity being depicted as highly desirable, it turns out to be a relatively marginal phenomenon, only growing slowly over the last 50 years.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.