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Identifying interdisciplinary research in research projects

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Abstract

Identifying interdisciplinary research has become an important area of study in scientometrics. However, defining what exactly constitutes interdisciplinarity and how it manifests in research activities, such as publications or research projects, remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a mathematical modeling approach to interdisciplinarity measurement based on assessing project diversity. Particularly, we propose a novel approach that combines three indicators: the diversity of researchers, the diversity of research organizations, and the diversity of research disciplines involved in the project, to identify potentially interdisciplinary research projects. To measure diversity, we employ various methods, including distance matrix calculation, evaluation of the distance between researchers, and assessment of the relevancy of researchers’ expertise to the projects. We implemented the proposed approach on two datasets; FRIS and Dimensions. We could classify the interdisciplinarity of projects into three groups—Low, Medium, and High. Empirical results analysis supports the proposed approach assumption that the diversity of research projects gets higher when the distances between disciplines in the projects increase. Further, it was shown that the diversity of researchers and organizations was strongly affected by the distance. The number of researchers and organizations had a relatively small impact on the overall diversity score. Furthermore, the relevancy weight can be incorporated as an additional factor in the measurement of interdisciplinary.

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Notes

  1. Data was collected on March 23th 2023.

  2. https://www.dimensions.ai/

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by The Expertise Center for Research and Development Monitoring (ECOOM), Flanders, Belgium. The authors would like to acknowledge Dimensions for granting access to their database. Further, the authors would like to thank the reviewers for the feedback and comments that they have made to improve the paper.

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Author notes

  1. Bram Vancraeynest, Hanne Poelmans, Sadia Vancauwenbergh and Amr Ali-Eldin have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Research & Development Monitoring (ECOOM-UHasselt), 3500, Hasselt, Belgium

    Hoang-Son Pham, Bram Vancraeynest, Hanne Poelmans, Sadia Vancauwenbergh & Amr Ali-Eldin

  2. Data Science Institute, Hasselt University, 3500, Hasselt, Belgium

    Hoang-Son Pham, Bram Vancraeynest, Hanne Poelmans, Sadia Vancauwenbergh & Amr Ali-Eldin

  3. Directorate Research, Library, International Office, Hasselt University, 3500, Hasselt, Belgium

    Hanne Poelmans & Sadia Vancauwenbergh

  4. Computer engineering and Control systems Department, Faculty of Engineering, Mansoura University, Mansoura, 35516, Egypt

    Amr Ali-Eldin

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  1. Hoang-Son Pham
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  2. Bram Vancraeynest
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Correspondence to Hoang-Son Pham.

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Pham, HS., Vancraeynest, B., Poelmans, H. et al. Identifying interdisciplinary research in research projects. Scientometrics 128, 5521–5544 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04810-6

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