Abstract
Disciplines vary in the types of communicative genres they use to disseminate knowledge and citing patterns used within these genres. However, citation analyses have predominately relied on the references and citations of one type of communicative genre. It is argued that this is particularly problematic for studies of interdisciplinarity, where analyses bias the disciplines that communicate using the genre under investigation. This may lead to inaccurate or incomplete results in terms of fully understanding the interrelationships between disciplines. This study analyzes a set of 15,870 references from 97 LIS dissertations, in order to demonstrate the difference in discipline and author rankings, based on the genre under investigation. This work encourages future work that takes into account multiple citing and cited works, especially where indicators of interdisciplinarity are used for the allocation of resources or ranking of scholars.
Notes
For more information about this sample and the selection procedure, see Sugimoto (2010). The data was taken from a larger study that evaluated mentoring and productivity in doctoral education. As such, the selection criteria is embedded in this study: it must be a full-time faculty member at an ALA-accredited LIS program, with a full-text version of the dissertation available via ProQuest, and a full and current CV available online. The non-randomness of this selection is an acknowledged limitation of the study. As this is a non-random sample, it should be emphasized that the results should be interpreted merely as indicators of difference between genres, rather than indicative of the top authors/disciplines within LIS.
Type was largely determined by the citation style, but other indicators such as title were also considered. WorldCat has a specific field for type and this was used to validate the original decision.
It should be noted that this calculation is inclusive of all references and does not normalize based on number of references. To analyze the effect of the extreme outlier (the dissertation with 895 references), the analysis was additionally conducted with the removal of this outlier. The change in results was insignificant—with the removal of the outlier, serials represented 46.90%; monographs represented 31.95%, and conferences represented 10.11%.
These classes were taken from the WorldCat record in the “Class Descriptors” field. Of those records containing an LC class in the class descriptor field, the majority contain only a single class LC class (along with classes for other systems, such as Dewey). However, some contain multiple LC classes in a single record, within the Class Descriptor field. In these cases, each class was counted, thereby counting the record multiple times, for each “discipline” in which it was classed. The item with three classes was the Journal of Planning Literature.
The cutoff for a unique class was the secondary level, for example BF for psychology or the primary level, for example Z (if no secondary level was present).
References
Becher, T. (1989). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines. Bury St. Edmunds: St. Edmundsbury Press.
Bordons, M., Zulueta, M. A., Romero, F., & Barrigón, S. (1999). Measuring interdisciplinary collaboration within a university: The effects of the multidisciplinary research programme. Scientometrics, 46(3), 383–398.
Boyack, K. W., Klavans, R., & Börner, K. (2005). Mapping the backbone of science. Scientometrics, 64(3), 351–374.
Braun, T., & Schubert, A. (2003). A quantitative view on the coming of age of interdisciplinarity in the sciences 1980–1999. Scientometrics, 58(1), 183–189.
Cronin, B. (2005). The hand of science: Academic writing and its rewards. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc.
de Bellis, N. (2009). Bibliometrics and citation analysis: From the Science Citation Index to cybermetrics. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Feller, I. (2006). Multiple actors, multiple settings, multiple criteria: Issues in assessing interdisciplinary research. Research Evaluation, 15(1), 5–15.
Gomez, I., Bordons, M., Fernandez, M. T., & Mendez, A. (1996). Coping with the problem of subject classification diversity. Scientometrics, 35(2), 223–235.
Hyland, K. (2004). Disciplinary discourses: Social interactions in academic writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Klavans, R., & Boyack, K. W. (2006). Identifying a better measure of relatedness for mapping science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(2), 251–263.
Klavans, R., & Boyack, K. W. (2009). Toward a consensus map of science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(3), 455–476.
Knorr Cetina, K. (2007). Culture in global knowledge societies: Knowledge cultures and epistemic cultures. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 32(4), 361–375.
Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions (3rd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Larivière, V., Archambault, É., Gingras, Y., & Vignola-Gagné, É. (2006). The place of serials in referencing practices: Comparing natural sciences and engineering with social sciences and humanities. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(8), 997–1004.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Levitt, J. M., & Thelwall, M. (2009). The most highly cited Library and Information Science articles: Interdisicplinarity, first authors and citation patterns. Scientometrics, 78(1), 45–67.
Leydesdorff, L. (2006). Mapping interdisciplinarity at the interfaces between the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index. Scientometrics, 71(3), 391–405.
Leydesdorff, L., & Rafols, I. (2009). A global map of science based on the ISI subject categories. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(2), 348–362.
Leydesdorff, L., & Schank, T. (2008). Dynamic animations of journal maps: Indicators of structural changes and interdisciplinary developments. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(11), 1810–1818.
McCain, K. W. (1998). Neural networks research in context: A longitudinal journal cocitation analysis of an emerging interdisciplinary field. Scientometrics, 41(3), 389–410.
Morillo, F., Bordons, M., & Gómez, I. (2003). Interdisciplinarity in science: A tentative typology of disciplines and research areas. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(13), 1237–1249.
Porter, A. L., Cohen, A. S., Roessner, J. D., & Perreault, M. (2007). Measuring research interdisciplinarity. Scientometrics, 72(1), 117–147.
Porter, A. L., & Rafols, I. (2009). Is science becoming more interdisciplinary? Measuring and mapping six research fields over time. Scientometrics, 81(3), 719–745.
Porter, A. L., Roessner, J. D., & Heberger, A. E. (2008). How interdisciplinary is a given body of research? Research Evaluation, 17(4), 273–282.
Price, D. J., de, S., & Beaver, D. (1966). Collaboration in an invisible college. American Pyschologist, 21(11), 1011–1018.
Rafols, I., & Leydesdorff, L. (2009). Content-based and algorithmic classifications of journals: Perspectives on the dynamics of scientific communication and indexer effects. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(9), 1823–1985.
Shibata, N., Kajikawa, Y., Takeda, Y., & Matsushima, K. (2009). Comparative study on methods of detecting research fronts using different types of citation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(3), 571–580.
Skilton, P. F. (2006). A comparative study of communal practice: Assessing the effects of taken-for-granted-ness on citation practice in scientific communities. Scientometrics, 68(1), 73–96.
Sugimoto, C. R. (2010). Mentoring, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity: An evaluation of the scholarly development of Information and Library Science doctoral students. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Turner, S. (2000). What are disciplines? And how is interdisciplinarity different? In P. Weingart & N. Stehr (Eds.), Practising interdisciplinarity (pp. 46–65). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Wallace, M. L., Gingras, Y., & Duhon, R. (2009). A new approach for detecting scientific specialties from raw cocitation networks. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(2), 240–246.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Alan Porter and Ismael Rafols for conversations on this topic and Staša Milojević, Russell Duhon, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This work was funded in part by the Thomson Reuters Citation Analysis Research Grant, awarded through the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sugimoto, C.R. Looking across communicative genres: a call for inclusive indicators of interdisciplinarity. Scientometrics 86, 449–461 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-010-0275-8
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-010-0275-8