Long-term trends in the multidisciplinarity of some typical natural and social sciences, and its implications on the SSH versus STM distinction

Sándor Soós (), Zsófia Vida and András Schubert
Additional contact information
Sándor Soós: Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA)
Zsófia Vida: Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA)
András Schubert: Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA)

Scientometrics, 2018, vol. 114, issue 3, No 2, 795-822

Abstract: Abstract Macro-level domains of the science system, usually referred to as STM and SSH disciplines, have often been contrasted from various perspectives, regarding the characteristic composition of their publication channels, referencing or communication practices, and the related consequences in research evaluation. It is also long been conjectured that social science fields (along with the humanities) are more multidisciplinary than natural science fields, regarding their patterns of scholarly communication (“multidisciplinarity thesis”). The main goal of the study reported in this paper is twofold: (1) to revisit the differences in multidisciplinarity between the SSH versus STM domain, via a long-term longitudinal survey including the most recent trends, and (2) to utilize, for this task, state-of-the-art metrics and models of Interdisciplinary Research, taking into account their limitations, that is, the data sources that most naturally feed these models (typically the Web of Science). Our conclusions provides further confirmation, from the perspective of multidisciplinarity, that the concepts of SSH and STM are mainly tools for communication, rather than empirically valid constructs.

Keywords: Trends; SSH; STM; Social sciences and humanities; Interdisciplinarity; Multidisciplinarity; IDR; Science overlay maps; Diversity; Review papers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-017-2589-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:scient:v:114:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-017-2589-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-017-2589-2

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().