Quantifying the interdisciplinarity of scientific journals and fields

F.N. Silva, F.A. Rodrigues, O.N. Oliveira and L. da F. Costa

Journal of Informetrics, 2013, vol. 7, issue 2, 469-477

Abstract: There is an overall perception of increased interdisciplinarity in science, but this is difficult to confirm quantitatively owing to the lack of adequate methods to evaluate subjective phenomena. This is no different from the difficulties in establishing quantitative relationships in human and social sciences. In this paper we quantified the interdisciplinarity of scientific journals and science fields by using an entropy measurement based on the diversity of the subject categories of journals citing a specific journal. The methodology consisted in building citation networks using the Journal Citation Reports® database, in which the nodes were journals and edges were established based on citations among journals. The overall network for the 11-year period (1999–2009) studied was small-world and followed a power-law with exponential cutoff distribution with regard to the in-strength. Upon visualizing the network topology an overall structure of the various science fields could be inferred, especially their interconnections. We confirmed quantitatively that science fields are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, with the degree of interdisplinarity (i.e. entropy) correlating strongly with the in-strength of journals and with the impact factor.

Keywords: Scientometry; Complex networks; Subjective phenomena quantification; Interdisciplinarity; Citation networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157713000096
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:infome:v:7:y:2013:i:2:p:469-477

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2013.01.007

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe

More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().