  The tremendous advances in computer science in the last few decades have
provided the platform to address and solve complex problems using
interdisciplinary research. In this paper, we investigate how the extent of
interdisciplinarity in computer science domain (which is further divided into
24 research fields) has changed over the last 50 years. To this end, we collect
a massive bibliographic dataset with rich metadata information. We start with
quantifying interdisciplinarity of a field in terms of the diversity of topics
and citations. We then analyze the effect of interdisciplinary research on the
scientific impact of individual fields and observe that highly disciplinary and
highly interdisciplinary papers in general have a low scientific impact;
remarkably those that are able to strike a balance between the two extremes
eventually land up having the highest impact. Further, we study the reciprocity
among fields through citation interactions and notice that links from one field
to related and citation-intensive fields (fields producing large number of
citations) are reciprocated heavily. A systematic analysis of the citation
interactions reveals the life trajectory of a research field, which generally
undergoes three phases -- a growing phase, a matured phase and an
interdisciplinary phase. The combination of metrics and empirical observations
presented here provides general benchmarks for future studies of
interdisciplinary research activities in other domains of science.
