  Interdisciplinary studies often require researchers to explore literature in
diverse branches of knowledge. Yet, navigating through the highly scattered
knowledge from unfamiliar disciplines poses a significant challenge. In this
paper, we introduce DiscipLink, a novel interactive system that facilitates
collaboration between researchers and large language models (LLMs) in
interdisciplinary information seeking (IIS). Based on users' topics of
interest, DiscipLink initiates exploratory questions from the perspectives of
possible relevant fields of study, and users can further tailor these
questions. DiscipLink then supports users in searching and screening papers
under selected questions by automatically expanding queries with
disciplinary-specific terminologies, extracting themes from retrieved papers,
and highlighting the connections between papers and questions. Our evaluation,
comprising a within-subject comparative experiment and an open-ended
exploratory study, reveals that DiscipLink can effectively support researchers
in breaking down disciplinary boundaries and integrating scattered knowledge in
diverse fields. The findings underscore the potential of LLM-powered tools in
fostering information-seeking practices and bolstering interdisciplinary
research.
