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The effect of multidisciplinary collaborations on research diversification

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Abstract

This work verifies whether research diversification by a scientist is in some measure related to their collaboration with multidisciplinary teams. The analysis considers the publications achieved by 5300 Italian academics in the sciences over the period 2004–2008. The findings show that a scientist’s outputs resulting from research diversification are more often than not the result of collaborations with multidisciplinary teams. The effect becomes more pronounced with larger and particularly with more diversified teams. This phenomenon is observed both at the overall level and for the disciplinary macro-areas.

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Notes

  1. A 5-year publication period is considered adequate to reduce the problem of paucity of publications and year-dependent fluctuations with systematic effects on results (Abramo et al. 2012).

  2. The percentages of Italian social science professors (by field) who have none of their 2001–2004 outputs covered by WoS, are: political economy, 66.2%; economic policy, 75.0%; finance, 69.2%; history of economic thought, 86.7%; econometrics, 28.0%; applied economics, 77.4%; business administration, 96.0%; corporate finance, 87.2%; financial management, 100.0%; business organisation, 81.4%; economics of financial intermediaries, 95.3%; economic history, 95.3%; commodity studies, 67.9% (D’Angelo and Abramo 2015).

  3. Mathematics and computer science, 2.74; physics, 4.54; chemistry, 4.83; earth sciences, 4.03; biology, 5.07; medicine, 6.13; agricultural and veterinary sciences, 4.52; civil engineering, 2.87; industrial and information engineering, 3.47.

  4. http://cercauniversita.cineca.it/php5/docenti/cerca.php . Last Accessed 14 Mar 2018.

  5. The harmonic average of precision and recall (F-measure) of authorships, as disambiguated by the algorithm, is around 97% (2% margin of error, 98% confidence interval).

  6. This step is conducted by: (1) identifying the scientist's production over the period of interest, as indexed in the WoS; (2) associate the publications with the subject categories of the hosting journals; (3) identify the subject category with the largest share of the scientist's publications.

  7. The macro-areas are: mathematics; physics; chemistry; earth and space sciences; biology; biomedical research; clinical medicine; engineering. Our assignment of SCs to macro-areas follows a pattern previously published on the website of ISI Journal Citation Reports, but no longer available on the current Clarivate portal. There are no cases in which an SC is assigned to more than one macro-area.

  8. There could be cases of academics with two or more core fields, i.e. with publications evenly distributed among them.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Studies in Research Evaluation, Institute for System Analysis and Computer Science (IASI-CNR), National Research Council of Italy, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo

  2. Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi e Informatica, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via dei Taurini 19, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Abramo

  3. Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Impresa, Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133, Rome, Italy

    Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo

  4. Research Value s.r.l., Via Michelangelo Tilli 39, 00156, Rome, Italy

    Flavia Di Costa

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  1. Giovanni Abramo
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  2. Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo
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  3. Flavia Di Costa
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Correspondence to Giovanni Abramo.

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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. & Di Costa, F. The effect of multidisciplinary collaborations on research diversification. Scientometrics 116, 423–433 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2746-2

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