Current Science

Open Access Open Access  Restricted Access Subscription Access

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.
User
Notifications
Font Size

  • Brillouin, L., Science and Information Theory, Academic Press, New York, 1956.

  • Small, H. G. and Griffith, B. C., The structure of scientific literatures: identifying and graphing specialties. Sci. Stud., 1974, 4, 17–40.

  • Porter, A. L. and Chubin, D. E., An indicator of cross-disciplinary research. Scientometrics, 1985, 8, 161–176.

  • Stirling, A., A general framework for analysing diversity in science, technology and society. J. R. Soc. Interface., 2007, 4, 707–719.

  • Rafols, I. and Meyer, M., Diversity and network coherence as indicators of interdisciplinarity: case studies in bionanoscience. Scientometrics, 2010, 82, 263–287.

  • Zhang, L., Rousseau, R. and Glänzel, W., Diversity of references as an indicator of the interdisciplinarity of journals: taking similarity between subject fields into account. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2016, 67, 1257–1265.

  • Leydesdorff, L. and Probst, C., The delineation of an interdisciplinary specialty in terms of a journal set: the case of communication studies. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2009, 60, 1709–1718.

  • Leydesdorff, L. and Rafols, I., Indicators of the interdisciplinarity of journals: diversity, centrality, and citations. J. Informetr., 2011, 5, 87–100.

  • Leydesdorff, L. and Rafols, I., Interactive overlays: a new method for generating global journal maps from Web-of-Science data. J. Informetr., 2012, 6, 318–332.

  • Steele, T. W. and Stier, J. C., The impact of interdisciplinary research in the environmental sciences: a forestry case study. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2000, 51, 476–484.

  • Huang, M. H. and Chang, Y. W., A study of interdisciplinarity in information science: using direct citation and co-authorship analysis. J. Inf. Sci., 2011, 37, 369–378.

  • Huang, M. H. and Chang, Y. W., A comparative study of interdisciplinary changes between information science and library science. Scientometrics, 2012, 91, 789–803.

  • Chang, Y. W. and Huang, M. H., A study of the evolution of interdisciplinarity in library and information science: using three bibliometric methods. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Tec., 2012, 63, 22– 33.

  • Adams, J., Jackson, L. and Marshall, S., Bibliometric analysis of interdisciplinary research, Report to Higher Education Funding Council for England, 2007.

  • Levitt, J. M. and Thelwall, M., Is multidisciplinary research more highly cited? A macrolevel study. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., 2008, 59, 1973–1984.

  • Uzzi, B. et al., Atypical combinations and scientific impact. Science, 2013, 342, 468–472.

  • Larivière, V., Haustein, S. and Börner, K., Long-distance interdisciplinarity leads to higher scientific impact. PLOS ONE, 2015, 10, e0122565.

  • Yegros-Yegros, A., Rafols, I. and D’Este, P., Does interdisciplinary research lead to higher citation impact? The different effect of proximal and distal interdisciplinarity. PLOS ONE, 2015, 10, e0135095.

  • Larivière, V. and Gingras, Y., On the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Tech., 2010, 61, 126–131.

  • McIntosh, R. P., An index of diversity and the relation of certain concepts to diversity. Ecology, 1967, 48, 392–404.

  • Hill, M. O., Diversity and evenness: a unifying notation and its consequences. Ecology, 1973, 54, 427–432.

  • Jost, L., Partitioning diversity into independent alpha and beta components. Ecology, 2007, 88, 2427–2439.

  • Jost, L., Mismeasuring biological diversity: response to Hoffmann and Hoffmann (2008). Ecol. Econ., 2009, 68, 925–928.


Abstract Views: 430

PDF Views: 154




  • Characterizing Interdisciplinarity of Nobel Laureates’ Key Publications

Abstract Views: 430  |  PDF Views: 154

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