Interdisciplinarity in science: A tentative typology of disciplines and research areas

Fernanda Morillo, María Bordons and Isabel Gómez

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2003, vol. 54, issue 13, 1237-1249

Abstract: Interdisciplinarity is considered the best way to face practical research topics since synergy between traditional disciplines has proved very fruitful. Studies on interdisciplinarity from all possible perspectives are increasingly demanded. Different interdisciplinarity measures have been used in case studies but, up to now, no general interdisciplinarity indicator useful for Science Policy purposes has been accepted. The bibliometric methodology presented here provides a general overview of all scientific disciplines, with special attention to their interrelation. This work aims to establish a tentative typology of disciplines and research areas according to their degree of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity is measured through a series of indicators based on Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) multi‐assignation of journals in subject categories. Research areas and categories are described according to the quantity of their links (number of related categories) and their quality (with close or distant categories, diversity, and strength of links). High levels of interrelations between categories are observed. Four different types of categories are found through cluster analysis. This differentiates “big” interdisciplinarity, which links distant categories, from “small” interdisciplinarity, in which close categories are related. The location of specific categories in the clusters is discussed.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (72)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.10326

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:54:y:2003:i:13:p:1237-1249

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().