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Looking across communicative genres: a call for inclusive indicators of interdisciplinarity

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Abstract

Disciplines vary in the types of communicative genres they use to disseminate knowledge and citing patterns used within these genres. However, citation analyses have predominately relied on the references and citations of one type of communicative genre. It is argued that this is particularly problematic for studies of interdisciplinarity, where analyses bias the disciplines that communicate using the genre under investigation. This may lead to inaccurate or incomplete results in terms of fully understanding the interrelationships between disciplines. This study analyzes a set of 15,870 references from 97 LIS dissertations, in order to demonstrate the difference in discipline and author rankings, based on the genre under investigation. This work encourages future work that takes into account multiple citing and cited works, especially where indicators of interdisciplinarity are used for the allocation of resources or ranking of scholars.

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Notes

  1. For more information about this sample and the selection procedure, see Sugimoto (2010). The data was taken from a larger study that evaluated mentoring and productivity in doctoral education. As such, the selection criteria is embedded in this study: it must be a full-time faculty member at an ALA-accredited LIS program, with a full-text version of the dissertation available via ProQuest, and a full and current CV available online. The non-randomness of this selection is an acknowledged limitation of the study. As this is a non-random sample, it should be emphasized that the results should be interpreted merely as indicators of difference between genres, rather than indicative of the top authors/disciplines within LIS.

  2. Type was largely determined by the citation style, but other indicators such as title were also considered. WorldCat has a specific field for type and this was used to validate the original decision.

  3. It should be noted that this calculation is inclusive of all references and does not normalize based on number of references. To analyze the effect of the extreme outlier (the dissertation with 895 references), the analysis was additionally conducted with the removal of this outlier. The change in results was insignificant—with the removal of the outlier, serials represented 46.90%; monographs represented 31.95%, and conferences represented 10.11%.

  4. These classes were taken from the WorldCat record in the “Class Descriptors” field. Of those records containing an LC class in the class descriptor field, the majority contain only a single class LC class (along with classes for other systems, such as Dewey). However, some contain multiple LC classes in a single record, within the Class Descriptor field. In these cases, each class was counted, thereby counting the record multiple times, for each “discipline” in which it was classed. The item with three classes was the Journal of Planning Literature.

  5. The cutoff for a unique class was the secondary level, for example BF for psychology or the primary level, for example Z (if no secondary level was present).

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Alan Porter and Ismael Rafols for conversations on this topic and Staša Milojević, Russell Duhon, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This work was funded in part by the Thomson Reuters Citation Analysis Research Grant, awarded through the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

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  1. School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University Bloomington, 1320 East 10th Street, LI 029, Bloomington, IN, 47405-3907, USA

    Cassidy R. Sugimoto

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Correspondence to Cassidy R. Sugimoto.

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Sugimoto, C.R. Looking across communicative genres: a call for inclusive indicators of interdisciplinarity. Scientometrics 86, 449–461 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-010-0275-8

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