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The many dimensions of laboratories’ interdisciplinarity

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Abstract

Interdisciplinarity is as trendy as it is difficult to define. Instead of trying to capture a multidimensional object with a single indicator, we propose six indicators, combining three different operationalizations of a discipline, two levels (article or laboratory) of integration of these disciplines and two measures of interdisciplinary diversity. This leads to a more meaningful characterization of the interdisciplinarity of laboratories’ publication practices. Thanks to a statistical analysis of these indicators on 600 CNRS laboratories, we suggest that, besides an average value of interdisciplinarity, different laboratories can be mainly distinguished by the “distance” between the disciplines in which they publish and by the scale at which interdisciplinary integration is achieved (article or laboratory).

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Notes

  1. http://www.cnrs.fr/en/aboutCNRS/institutes.htm.

  2. We exclude the JSC “Multidisciplinary Sciences” from analysis because by definition this JSC mixes articles (often monodisciplinary) from many disciplines.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the “Service d’appui à la politique et à la prospective scientifiques” of the CNRS provided publication data related to CNRS laboratories for our research work. We also thank the CNRS Interdisciplinary Mission for financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut Rhône-Alpin des Systèmes Complexes (IXXI) and Laboratoire de Physique, UMR CNRS 5672, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 69007, Lyon, France

    Pablo Jensen & Katsiaryna Lutkouskaya

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  1. Pablo Jensen
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  2. Katsiaryna Lutkouskaya
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Correspondence to Pablo Jensen.

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Jensen, P., Lutkouskaya, K. The many dimensions of laboratories’ interdisciplinarity. Scientometrics 98, 619–631 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1129-y

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