A topic model approach to measuring interdisciplinarity at the National Science Foundation

Leah G. Nichols ()
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Leah G. Nichols: National Science Foundation

Scientometrics, 2014, vol. 100, issue 3, No 9, 754 pages

Abstract: Abstract As the National Science Foundation (NSF) implements new cross-cutting initiatives and programs, interest in assessing the success of these experiments in fostering interdisciplinarity grows. A primary challenge in measuring interdisciplinarity is identifying and bounding the discrete disciplines that comprise interdisciplinary work. Using statistical text-mining techniques to extract topic bins, the NSF recently developed a topic map of all of their awards issued between 2000 and 2011. These new data provide a novel means for measuring interdisciplinarity by assessing the language or content of award proposals. Using the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences as a case study and drawing on the new topic model of the NSF’s awards, this paper explores new methods for quantifying interdisciplinarity in the NSF portfolio.

Keywords: Interdisciplinarity; Topic model; Network analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11192-014-1319-2

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