Abstract
Research and development of rice, a major crop, has been promoted on an interdisciplinary basis with the involvement of various research fields ranging from natural sciences to socioeconomics in Japan. This paper focuses on the structure of interdisciplinarity in Japanese rice research and technology development by analyzing the relationship among all relevant disciplines with the use of a compiled bibliography of Japanese rice research with 19,389 articles in 1,611 journals in the publishing years of 1990–2000. The relationship among the disciplines was characterized by the frequency distribution of articles among journals classified into 24 categories based on the law of scattering originally identified by Bradford (Engineering 13:785–786, 1934). The 24 journal categories ranked in decreasing order of productivity of articles were divided into 3 zones; the first nuclear zone with a smaller number of highly productive journal disciplines; the second zone with a large number of less productive disciplines; and the last zone with a larger number of the least productive disciplines, which characterized the structure of interdisciplinarity in Japanese rice research and technology development. Other aspects of the interdisciplinarity were further explored with reference to peripheral journals with a minimal number of papers on a certain subject, and the Groos droop phenomenon at the end of Bradford’s S-shape curve that is the region of the least productive journals with only one paper on a certain subject, by analyzing the frequency distribution of articles in journal categories.
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Notes
The publishing years 1990–2000 (11 years) that were analyzed preceded the implementation of the largest institutional reform in Japan where national institutes, national universities, and local government institutes were reorganized and integrated with a view to promote more innovative and efficient research activities through the enhancement of industry-academia-government collaboration.
The Rice Bibliography has been used to carry out bibliometric studies on world rice research by Lawani and Sariki (1974) mainly for analyzing the growth rate of world rice publications from 1951 to 1971; by Morooka (1985) for comparison of the growth of rice publications between Japan and other countries from 1951 to 1983; and by Hayami et al. (1989) for the impact of world rice market prices on investment in rice research from 1951 to 1986.
A rapid increase in the number of articles in 1994 (Fig. 1) was due to the appearance of many articles on rice crop damage and/or countermeasures associated with the severe cool summer weather that occurred in 1993.
The specification quotient in Table 1 was calculated by dividing the ratio of the number of articles by the ratio of the number of journal titles in each publisher.
General (A) was excluded in this analysis because it bordered various fields and covered a small number of articles (126, 0.6 %) of a total number of 19,389 articles.
However, comparison of the proportional amount of publications in each research category between the periods of 1971–1980 (Morooka 1985) and 1990–2000 showed that the ratio of most research categories changed except for botanical research in the two periods. This is presumably due to the changes in the interrelationships among all the research categories in advances in science, social changes, and so forth, over a longer period of time. On the other hand, botanical research involving advanced basic research fields as well as breeding science had maintained almost the same ratio of 24 % on average over the periods from 1971 to 2000. This was probably because botanical research was not very much affected by research activities in the other research categories, as those categories were flexibly affected by the interaction among all the research categories with the progress of science in the case of Japanese rice research and technology development during the period of 1971–2000. Wholeness, transformation, and self-control in structuralism (Piaget 1968) could be perhaps applicable to structural relationship of the disciplines in interdisciplinarity in Japanese rice research and technology development during the period of 1971–2000.
In the journals relevant to socioeconomics and home economics, respectively, an individual journal often dealt with several subject fields, so that it was difficult to classify them adequately into subcategories. As a result, a category was considered to be a subcategory, and vice versa, as with mine engineering, which was not subdivided in the journal service by the Japan Science and Technology Agency, as shown in Table 4.
See footnote 6—Journal disciplines including socioeconomics and home economics, were not analyzed here, respectively, as with sciences whose major subdiscipline, science in general, involves various subdisciplines.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Dr. Klaus Lampe, former Director General, the International Rice Research Institute and Dr. Keijiro Kainuma, former Director General, Japan International Center for Agricultural Sciences, for their support; Ms. Yuko Kuramasu and Ms. Chika Nakajima, former staff members, the JLO, for their assistance in compiling the JBRR, and Dr. Hiroyuki Hibino, former head of the Japan Office, the International Rice Research Institute for his encouragement; Mrs. Lina M. Vergara, Ms. Milagros C. Zamora, and Ms. Carmelita S. Austria, former staff members of the Library, the International Rice Research Institute, and Ms. Elaine E. Joshi, Chief Librarian, the Philippine Rice Research Institute for their advice and support; Library of the Japan International Center for Agricultural Sciences, for providing their library resources; Professor Nobuyuki Midorikawa, University of Tsukuba and Dr. Takashi Nagatsuka, President, the Japan Association of Agricultural Librarians and Information Specialists, for their useful suggestions.
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Morooka, K., Ramos, M.M. & Nathaniel, F.N. A bibliometric approach to interdisciplinarity in Japanese rice research and technology development. Scientometrics 98, 73–98 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1119-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1119-0