A bridge over troubled water: Interdisciplinarity, Novelty, and Impact

Magda Fontana, Martina Iori, Fabio Montobbio and Roberta Sinatra ()
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Roberta Sinatra: Dept. of Network & Data Science, and Dept. of Mathematics, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary - Center for Complex Network Research, Northeastern University, Boston, USA - Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria

No dipe0002, DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Politica Economica from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE)

Abstract: This paper analyses the relationship between novelty, interdisciplinarity and impact of scientific research. We discuss the limitations of the established indicators of novelty and interdisciplinarity (Variety, Disparity and Balance) and how they overlap. We correct the biases with normalized indicators that exploit a Configuration Null Model and we propose a protocol to verify the reliability of the indicators and standardize the measurement. The proposed methodology and new indicators are illustrated exploiting 231450 articles in Physics, their references and citations, from 8 Journals of the American Physical Society (APS) from 1985 to 2015. We show that Novelty à la Uzzi et al. (2013) is highly correlated with Disparity and Novelty à la Wang et al. (2017) is deeply affected by the properties of the articles’ citation network. We show the importance of taking into account the specific definition of the knowledge space and considering separately the different dimensions of interdisciplinarity. Using the new unbiased indicators we show that Variety has a positive effect on the articles’ Impact while Disparity and Balance have a negative effect. Previous results tend to underestimate the negative Impact of Disparity and overestimate the positive effects of Novelty.

Keywords: measurement of interdisciplinarity; detection of novelty; impact; normalization of measures; Physics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 O31 O33 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50
Date: 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe and nep-ino
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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