Abstract
The present paper takes its place in the stream of studies that analyze the effect of interdisciplinarity on the impact of research output. Unlike previous studies, in this study the interdisciplinarity of the publications is not inferred through their citing or cited references, but rather by identifying the authors’ designated fields of research. For this we draw on the scientific classification of Italian academics, and their publications as indexed in the WoS over a 5-year period (2004–2008). We divide the publications in three subsets on the basis the nature of co-authorship: those papers coauthored with academics from different fields, which show high intensity of inter-field collaboration (“specific” collaboration, occurring in 110 pairings of fields); those papers coauthored with academics who are simply from different “non-specific” fields; and finally co-authorships within a single field. We then compare the citations of the papers and the impact factor of the publishing journals between the three subsets. The results show significant differences, generally in favor of the interdisciplinary authorships, in only one third (or slightly more) of the cases. The analysis provides the value of the median differences for each pair of publication subsets.
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Notes
http://www.nature.com/news/interdisciplinarity-1.18295, last accessed on 9 November 2016.
Simpson’s Index of Diversity, originally developed in biology, is defined in bibliometrics as \(1 - \sum p_{i}^{2}\), where \(p_{i} = {\raise0.7ex\hbox{${x_{i} }$} \!\mathord{\left/ {\vphantom {{x_{i} } X}}\right.\kern-0pt} \!\lower0.7ex\hbox{$X$}}\); \(X = \sum x_{i}\), and \(x_{i}\) is the number of references to the i-th subject category.
The list of all SDSs is reported in “Appendix 1” Section.
We define the “specific degree of interdisciplinarity” of a field with another specific research field as the ratio between the number of publications co-authored by researchers from both fields, to the number of publications authored by researchers belonging to the first field. The reader is referred to Abramo et al. (2012) for additional details on the methodology for identifying the SDS pairs with the highest collaboration rates.
This scaling factor results as the most effective at normalizing citations (Abramo et al. 2012).
Per publications in multi-category journals, the value of the indicator is equal to the average of the values for the individual subject categories.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
See Table 6.
Appendix 2
See Table 7.
Appendix 3
See Table 8.
Appendix 4
See Table 9.
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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. & Di Costa, F. Do interdisciplinary research teams deliver higher gains to science?. Scientometrics 111, 317–336 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2253-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2253-x