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Comparing different perspectives of characterizing interdisciplinarity of scientific publications: author vs. publication perspectives

Published: 20 June 2022 Publication History

Abstract

This study compares two distinct perspectives of characterizing interdisciplinarity of scientific publications, namely author- and publication-based perspectives. The publication-based perspectives calculate interdisciplinarity of a publication from its references and citing papers. Author-based perspectives characterize interdisciplinarity of a scientific publication using its authors' prior published records. We employ various extant diversity indicators including variety, balance, disparity, Simpson's index, 2DS, and ID to capture the characteristics of interdisciplinarity from different perspectives. An overall analysis, journal-level analysis, and case studies are provided in the current study. We find that author- and publication-based perspectives are distinct from each other and they contribute to a more holistic picture of interdisciplinarity. Additionally, our results show that characterizing interdisciplinarity from authors' citing papers would generate a ranking that better distinguishes publications.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Interdisciplinary research attracts greater attention from policy documents: evidence from COVID-19Humanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-024-02915-811:1Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Female early-career scientists have conducted less interdisciplinary research in the past six decades: evidence from doctoral thesesHumanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-023-02392-510:1Online publication date: 7-Dec-2023

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  1. Comparing different perspectives of characterizing interdisciplinarity of scientific publications: author vs. publication perspectives

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    JCDL '22: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
    June 2022
    392 pages
    ISBN:9781450393454
    DOI:10.1145/3529372
    • General Chairs:
    • Akiko Aizawa,
    • Thomas Mandl,
    • Zeljko Carevic,
    • Program Chairs:
    • Annika Hinze,
    • Philipp Mayr,
    • Philipp Schaer
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 20 June 2022

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    Author Tags

    1. citation relationship
    2. co-authorship
    3. interdisciplinarity
    4. measurement
    5. scientometrics

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    JCDL '22 Paper Acceptance Rate 35 of 132 submissions, 27%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 415 of 1,482 submissions, 28%

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    View all
    • (2024)Interdisciplinary research attracts greater attention from policy documents: evidence from COVID-19Humanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-024-02915-811:1Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
    • (2023)Female early-career scientists have conducted less interdisciplinary research in the past six decades: evidence from doctoral thesesHumanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-023-02392-510:1Online publication date: 7-Dec-2023

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