  Nowadays, scientific challenges usually require approaches that cross
traditional boundaries between academic disciplines, driving many researchers
towards interdisciplinarity. Despite its obvious importance, there is a lack of
studies on how to quantify the influence of interdisciplinarity on the research
impact, posing uncertainty in a proper evaluation for hiring and funding
purposes. Here we propose a method based on the analysis of bipartite
interconnected multilayer networks of citations and disciplines, to assess
scholars, institutions and countries interdisciplinary importance. Using data
about physics publications and US patents, we show that our method allows to
reward, using a quantitative approach, scholars and institutions that have
carried out interdisciplinary work and have had an impact in different
scientific areas. The proposed method could be used by funding agencies,
universities and scientific policy decision makers for hiring and funding
purposes, and to complement existing methods to rank universities and
countries.
