Disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in citation and reference dimensions: knowledge importation and exportation taxonomy of journals

This work proposes an entropy-based disciplinarity indicator (EBDI) which allows the classification of scientific journals in four classes: knowledge importer, knowledge exporter, disciplinary and interdisciplinary with regards to the discipline(s) in which they are classified. Assuming that the set references in the papers published in a journal represent a significant part of their knowledge basis, the diversity (measured with Shannon’s entropy) and ratio between internal and external (to the discipline in which the journal is classified) references can provide a measure of the disciplinarity/interdisciplinarity of the journal in the reference dimension. The homologous analysis can be applied to the set of citations received by the papers published in the journal. In this article, an entropy-based indicator for the measurement of the disciplinarity of scientific journals is developed, applied (to the cited and citing dimensions) and discussed. The indicator can take finite values and it is found to be theoretically consistent when tested against two definitions for bibliometric indicators. The combinations of disciplinarity values in the citing and cited dimensions permits the classification of journals according to their knowledge importing/exporting profile (separately, with regards to the social sciences or the sciences), providing a taxonomy of the role of journals according to their importing, exporting, interdisciplinary or specialized profile with regards to the subject category in which they are classified. The indicator, EBDI and the resulting taxonomy is proposed and tested for the set of journals in LIS subject category in JCR 2013 and for the sets of journals in Andrology and Legal Medicine in JCR 2015. Evidence of concurrent validity with journal co-classification patterns is found in the three sets of journals.

[1]  吉田 仁美,et al.  Strength in Diversity , 2019, Bridging Communities through Socially Engaged Art.

[2]  Arif Khan,et al.  A Framework to Explore the Knowledge Structure of Multidisciplinary Research Fields , 2015, PloS one.

[3]  Mark D Thornquist,et al.  The collaboration readiness of transdisciplinary research teams and centers findings from the National Cancer Institute's TREC Year-One evaluation study. , 2008, American journal of preventive medicine.

[4]  Ismael Rafols,et al.  Indicators of the interdisciplinarity of journals: Diversity, centrality, and citations , 2010, J. Informetrics.

[5]  Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka,et al.  Bibliometric indicators of interdisciplinarity: the potential of the Leinster–Cobbold diversity indices to study disciplinary diversity , 2016, Scientometrics.

[6]  Loet Leydesdorff,et al.  Dynamic animations of journal maps: Indicators of structural changes and interdisciplinary developments , 2009, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[7]  Anton J. Nederhof,et al.  Bibliometric monitoring of research performance in the Social Sciences and the Humanities: A Review , 2006, Scientometrics.

[8]  Ross Atkinson.  The Citation as Intertext: Toward a Theory of the Selection Process. , 1984 .

[9]  Ismael Rafols,et al.  How journal rankings can suppress interdisciplinary research: A comparison between Innovation Stud , 2012 .

[10]  Michael Mabe,et al.  Growth dynamics of scholarly and scientific journals , 2001, Scientometrics.

[11]  Alexander I. Pudovkin,et al.  Algorithmic procedure for finding semantically related journals , 2002, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[12]  J. Ziman,et al.  The proliferation of scientific literature: a natural process. , 1980, Science.

[13]  Isabel Gómez,et al.  Interdisciplinarity in science: A tentative typology of disciplines and research areas , 2003, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[14]  Tom Leinster,et al.  Measuring diversity: the importance of species similarity. , 2012, Ecology.

[15]  Ismael Rafols,et al.  Interdisciplinarity and Research on Local Issues: Evidence from a Developing Country , 2013, 1304.6742.

[16]  魏屹东,et al.  Scientometrics , 2018, Encyclopedia of Big Data.

[17]  Kevin W. Boyack,et al.  Approaches to understanding and measuring interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR): A review of the literature , 2011, J. Informetrics.

[18]  Thed N. van Leeuwen,et al.  Towards a new crown indicator: Some theoretical considerations , 2010, J. Informetrics.

[19]  Michel Zitt,et al.  Delineating complex scientific fields by an hybrid lexical-citation method: An application to nanosciences , 2006, Inf. Process. Manag..

[20]  Loet Leydesdorff,et al.  Non-consistency, non-cited items, and the impact factor: A consequence of the arithmetic , 2011, ArXiv.

[21]  Ben R. Martin,et al.  Science and technology studies: exploring the knowledge base , 2011 .

[22]  Wolfgang Glänzel,et al.  Diversity of references as an indicator of the interdisciplinarity of journals: Taking similarity between subject fields into account , 2016, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[23]  D. T. Tomov,et al.  Comparative indicators of interdisciplinarity in modern science , 1996, Scientometrics.

[24]  R. Tijssen.  A quantitative assessment of interdisciplinary structures in science and technology: Co-classification analysis of energy research☆ , 1992 .

[25]  Ismael Rafols,et al.  Is science becoming more interdisciplinary? Measuring and mapping six research fields over time , 2009, Scientometrics.

[26]  Alan L. Porter,et al.  Measuring researcher interdisciplinarity , 2007, Scientometrics.

[27]  A. Stirling.  A general framework for analysing diversity in science, technology and society , 2007, Journal of The Royal Society Interface.

[28]  Alan L. Porter,et al.  An indicator of cross-disciplinary research , 1985, Scientometrics.

[29]  Ismael Rafols,et al.  Diversity and network coherence as indicators of interdisciplinarity: case studies in bionanoscience , 2009, Scientometrics.

[30]  Robert T Croyle,et al.  The National Cancer Institute's transdisciplinary centers initiatives and the need for building a science of team science. , 2008, American journal of preventive medicine.

[31]  T. V. Leeuwen,et al.  Assessment of the scientific basis of interdisciplinary, applied research: Application of bibliometric methods in Nutrition and Food Research , 2002 .

[32]  Éric Archambault,et al.  Comparing bibliometric statistics obtained from the Web of Science and Scopus , 2009 .

[33]  C. Ricotta,et al.  Towards a unifying approach to diversity measures: bridging the gap between the Shannon entropy and Rao's quadratic index. , 2006, Theoretical population biology.

[34]  Loet Leydesdorff,et al.  Betweenness centrality as an indicator of the interdisciplinarity of scientific journals , 2007, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[35]  C. R. Rao,et al.  Diversity: its measurement, decomposition, apportionment and analysis , 1982 .

[36]  Hilde Tobi,et al.  Measurement in interdisciplinary research: The contributions of widely-defined measurement and portfolio representations , 2014 .

[37]  Peter van den Besselaar,et al.  The dynamics of interdisciplinary research fields: the case of river research , 2014, Scientometrics.