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Characterizing Interdisciplinarity of Nobel Laureates’ Key Publications


Affiliations
1 Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and Knowledge Service, School of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
 

To know whether greater or smaller interdisciplinarity benefits high-quality scientific outputs, two indicators, the Brillouin’s (BI) and Hill-type (HI) indices, are applied to characterize interdisciplinarity of key publications of Nobel laureates from 2001 to 2010. Both BI and HI indicate that smaller interdisciplinarity benefits the creative works of these Nobel laureates. The results show high concordance between BI and HI, with high correlation (>0.8). Although all values, with BI < 1 and HI < 12, show that the interdisciplinarity is always small in the sample, the study also shows that interdisciplinary studies are more widely distributed in the field of physiology or medicine than that in physics.

Keywords

Interdisciplinarity, Interdisciplinary Measure, Nobel Laureates’ Key Publications.
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  • Characterizing Interdisciplinarity of Nobel Laureates’ Key Publications

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Authors

Helena H. Zhang
Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and Knowledge Service, School of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Ruby W. Wang
Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and Knowledge Service, School of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Ronda J. Zhang
Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and Knowledge Service, School of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
Fred Y. Ye
Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and Knowledge Service, School of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China

Abstract


To know whether greater or smaller interdisciplinarity benefits high-quality scientific outputs, two indicators, the Brillouin’s (BI) and Hill-type (HI) indices, are applied to characterize interdisciplinarity of key publications of Nobel laureates from 2001 to 2010. Both BI and HI indicate that smaller interdisciplinarity benefits the creative works of these Nobel laureates. The results show high concordance between BI and HI, with high correlation (>0.8). Although all values, with BI < 1 and HI < 12, show that the interdisciplinarity is always small in the sample, the study also shows that interdisciplinary studies are more widely distributed in the field of physiology or medicine than that in physics.

Keywords


Interdisciplinarity, Interdisciplinary Measure, Nobel Laureates’ Key Publications.

References





DOI: https://doi.org/10.18520/cs%2Fv117%2Fi7%2F1148-1152