  An increased interdisciplinarity in science projects has been highlighted as
crucial to tackle complex real-world challenges, but also as beneficial for the
development of disciplines themselves. This paper introduces a parcimonious
agent-based model of interdisciplinary relationships in collective entreprises
of knowledge discovery, to investigate the impact of scientist-level decisions
and preferences on global interdisciplinarity patterns. Under the assumption of
simple rules for individual researcher project management, such as trade-offs
between invested time overhead and knowledge benefit, model simulations show
that individual choices influence the distribution of compromise points between
emergent level of disciplinary depth and interdisciplinarity in a non-linear
way. Different structures for collaboration networks may also yield various
outcomes in terms of global interdisciplinarity. We conclude that independently
of the research field, the organization of research, and more particularly the
local balancing between vertical and horizontal research, already influences
the final positioning of research results and the extent of the knowledge
front. This suggests direct applications to research policies with a bottom-up
leverage on the interactions between disciplines.
