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Long-term trends in the multidisciplinarity of some typical natural and social sciences, and its implications on the SSH versus STM distinction

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Abstract

Macro-level domains of the science system, usually referred to as STM and SSH disciplines, have often been contrasted from various perspectives, regarding the characteristic composition of their publication channels, referencing or communication practices, and the related consequences in research evaluation. It is also long been conjectured that social science fields (along with the humanities) are more multidisciplinary than natural science fields, regarding their patterns of scholarly communication (“multidisciplinarity thesis”). The main goal of the study reported in this paper is twofold: (1) to revisit the differences in multidisciplinarity between the SSH versus STM domain, via a long-term longitudinal survey including the most recent trends, and (2) to utilize, for this task, state-of-the-art metrics and models of Interdisciplinary Research, taking into account their limitations, that is, the data sources that most naturally feed these models (typically the Web of Science). Our conclusions provides further confirmation, from the perspective of multidisciplinarity, that the concepts of SSH and STM are mainly tools for communication, rather than empirically valid constructs.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the European Commission under the FP7 Grant No. 613202 (IMPACT-EV project).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department Science Policy and Scientometrics, Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA), Budapest, Hungary

    Sándor Soós, Zsófia Vida & András Schubert

Authors
  1. Sándor Soós
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  2. Zsófia Vida
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  3. András Schubert
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sándor Soós.

Appendix

Appendix

Annual trends in the percentage share of references to serials in all references to the last 5 years.

Sciences

See Figs. 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11.

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Emergency Medicine

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Mathematical Physics

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Nanoscience and Technology

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Soil Science

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Spectroscopy

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Social sciences

See Figs. 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16.

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Economics

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Information and Library Science

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Political Science

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Social Psychology

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Sociology

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Arts and humanities

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Architecture

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History and Philosophy of Science

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Music

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Poetry

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Religion

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Soós, S., Vida, Z. & Schubert, A. Long-term trends in the multidisciplinarity of some typical natural and social sciences, and its implications on the SSH versus STM distinction. Scientometrics 114, 795–822 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2589-2

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