Diversity and network coherence as indicators of interdisciplinarity: case studies in bionanoscience

By Ismael Rafols, Martin S. Meyer. Scientometrics, 2009

667 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The multidimensional character and inherent conflict with categorisation of interdisciplinarity makes its mapping and evaluation a challenging task. We propose a conceptual framework that aims to capture interdisciplinarity in the wider sense of knowledge integration, by exploring the concepts of diversity and coherence. Disciplinary diversity indicators are developed to describe the heterogeneity of a bibliometric set viewed from predefined categories, i.e. using a top-down approach that locates the set on the global map of science. Network coherence indicators are constructed to measure the intensity of similarity relations within a bibliometric set, i.e. using a bottom-up approach, which reveals the structural consistency of the publications network. We carry out case studies on individual articles in bionanoscience to illustrate how these two perspectives identify different aspects of interdisciplinarity: disciplinary diversity indicates the large-scale breadth of the knowledge base of a publication; network coherence reflects the novelty of its knowledge integration. We suggest that the combination of these two approaches may be useful for comparative studies of emergent scientific and technological fields, where new and controversial categorisations are accompanied by equally contested claims of novelty and interdisciplinarity.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Molecular Biology, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba67fce38122d7627e1ef7090ccb0a4dd6fe196b

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Citations in the corpus

Prominent but Less Productive (2015, background): “Compared with other measures of diversity, Porter’s measure of ‘‘integration’’ incorporates not only the variety (i.e., number) of categories and their balance (i.e., the evenness of the distribution) but also their similarity (i.e., their cognitive distance) into one index (Rafols and Meyer, 2010).”
How interdisciplinary is sustainability research? Analyzing the structure of an emerging scientific field (2011, methodology): “Bibliometric data have been used in a growing number of studies of the structures of, and connections between, subfields in the natural and applied sciences (Porter et al. 2008; Porter and Rafols 2009; Rafols and Meyer 2010) and operations management (Nakamura et al.”
The science of science: from the perspective of complex systems (2017, background): “Using similarity in citing patterns, the networks between WoS subject categories can also be built [96].”
Measuring Scholarly Impact (2014, background): “Bergstrom, C. T. (2007). Eigenfactor: Measuring the value and prestige of scholarly journals.”
Tracking the evolution of waste recycling research using overlay maps of science. (2011, methodology): “Only recently have new indicators incorporating disparity been devised, using the metrics of similarity behind the science maps (Porter et al., 2007; Rafols and Meyer, 2010).”