Historical and sociological analysis of science often focuses on the structure, organisation and operations of scientific disciplines and eventually differences between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Indeed, the study and advocacy of disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity today frequently constitutes an academic, political and economic battle ground. This article suggests an alternative increasingly prevalent framework in the organisation and operation of research work that we here dub “the new disciplinarity” by contrast with “traditional disciplinarity”. We mobilize our abundant empirical data on nanoscale scientific research to document the characteristics and relations specific to the new disciplinarity. Key features of this new disciplinarity include “referent”, “borderland”, “project”, “displacement” and “temporality”.