Interdisciplinarity Metric Based on the Co-Citation Network

Juan María Hernández and Pablo Dorta-González
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Juan María Hernández: Department of Quantitative Methods in Economics and Management, and Institute TiDES, University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 35017 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain

Mathematics, 2020, vol. 8, issue 4, 1-8

Abstract: Quantifying the interdisciplinarity of a research is a relevant problem in the evaluative bibliometrics. The concept of interdisciplinarity is ambiguous and multidimensional. Thus, different measures of interdisciplinarity have been propose in the literature. However, few studies have proposed interdisciplinary metrics without previously defining classification sets, and no one has used the co-citation network for this purpose. In this study we propose an interdisciplinary metric based on the co-citation network. This is a way to define the publication’s field without resorting to pre-defined classification sets. We present a characterization of a publication’s field and then we use this definition to propose a new metric of the interdisciplinarity degree for publications (papers) and journals as units of analysis. The proposed measure has an aggregative property that makes it scalable from a paper individually to a set of them (journal) without more than adding the numerators and denominators in the proportions that define this new indicator. Moreover, the aggregated value of two or more units is strictly among all the individual values.

Keywords: interdisciplinary research; IDR; interdisciplinarity metric; bibliometric index; co-citation network; publication’s field; scientometrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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