Abstract: The paper explores the impact of interdisciplinary collaboration on scientific breakthroughs at the granularity of research topics, advancing our understanding of the driving mechanisms behind scientific breakthroughs. By analyzing the dynamic characteristics of temporal data, it unveils the breakthrough potential of emerging research topics and their interdisciplinary features. Specifically this paper initially identifies scientific breakthrough topics based on emerging research topics and examines their interdisciplinary characteristics. Furthermore, the consistency in the increase and decrease evolutionary trends in the number of citations and the number of cross-disciplinary documents on scientific breakthrough topics and their knowledge base documents is analyzed. Finally, it measures the predictive causal relationship between the citation count of scientific breakthrough topics and their interdisciplinary quantity time series, thus investigating the association between the emergence of scientific breakthroughs and interdisciplinarity. Using stem cells research as a case study, this empirical research categorizes the interdisciplinary characteristics of scientific breakthrough topics into three categories. Results show that there is a great consistency between the scientific breakthrough topics and the knowledge base in the increase and decrease evolutionary trends in the number of citations and interdisciplinary quantity. However, the predictive causal relationship between the citation time series of most scientific breakthrough topics and the time series of interdisciplinary is not significant. Therefore, relying solely on the interdisciplinary quantity metric may not effectively identify or predict scientific breakthrough topics. The paper provides valuable insights to better understand the characteristics of scientific breakthrough research.

Key words: Scientific breakthrough, Interdisciplinary, Citation curve, Evolutionary characteristics, Dynamic mechanism, Emerging research topics