How journal rankings can suppress interdisciplinary research. A comparison between Innovation Studies and Business & Management

This study provides quantitative evidence on how the use of journal rankings can disadvantage interdisciplinary research in research evaluations. Using publication and citation data, it compares the degree of interdisciplinarity and the research performance of a number of Innovation Studies units with that of leading Business & Management schools in the UK. On the basis of various mappings and metrics, this study shows that: (i) Innovation Studies units are consistently more interdisciplinary in their research than Business & Management schools; (ii) the top journals in the Association of Business Schools' rankings span a less diverse set of disciplines than lower-ranked journals; (iii) this results in a more favourable assessment of the performance of Business & Management schools, which are more disciplinary-focused. This citation-based analysis challenges the journal ranking-based assessment. In short, the investigation illustrates how ostensibly 'excellence-based' journal rankings exhibit a systematic bias in favour of mono-disciplinary research. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications of these phenomena, in particular how the bias is likely to affect negatively the evaluation and associated financial resourcing of interdisciplinary research organisations, and may result in researchers becoming more compliant with disciplinary authority over time.Comment: 41 pages, 10 figure

A Review of Theory and Practice in Scientometrics

Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the historical development of scientometrics, sources of citation data, citation metrics and the “laws" of scientometrics, normalisation, journal impact factors and other journal metrics, visualising and mapping science, evaluation and policy, and future developments

Publication trends and interdisciplinary collaboration across the archaeological science/humanities-divide: Investigations into the epistemological structure of the archaeological discipline

The present master thesis is an article-based dissertation, comprising two individual research papers and an introductory essay. Both papers correspond to a shared set of overarching aims: 1. To investigate the composition and state of archaeological epistemology, focusing on comparability and integration between sub-fields of the archaeological discipline. 2. To better understand the potential impact of the science/humanities-divide upon archaeological practice in publishing and applied epistemology in research strategies. These aims are mostly examined separately in the two papers. When put together, the main ambition is to provide a deeper understanding of the relation between the structure and properties of archaeological epistemology and diverse practice (within archaeology and in interdisciplinary cooperation), as influenced by the science/humanities-divide. "Measuring incommensurability: A bibliometric inquiry into what papers are presented in archaeological journals (2009-13), and the epistemic consequences" This paper presents the results of bibliometric analyzes conducted on a data set consisting of 926 archaeological papers. The data comprises all original research papers published in six top ranking archaeological journals in the period 2009-2013. The included journals are taken to represent different sub-fields in archaeology: Historical, anthropological, social, scientific, environmental and general archaeology. The aim is to map general features of archaeological publishing. Significant differences are identified amongst the journals on an array of parameters, covering journal statistics, citation network, thematic distribution, the application of methods and the direction of relevance to other sub-fields. Furthermore, the paper engages in an extended discussion over the epistemological consequences of the bibliometric results, focusing on disciplinary fragmentation, incommensurability, vagueness and the purported significance of the science/humanities-divide. "Identifying key factors affecting the two cultures -relation of archaeology – Outlining a common epistemological platform for archaeology and archaeometry" In relating to the debate over the nature of archaeology along the science/humanities-spectrum, this paper seeks to understand some epistemological challenges arising from integrating scientific methodologies with archaeology. The main objective is to evaluate what epistemological platform might integrate archaeology and archaeometry in interdisciplinary research projects, and how such a platform might provide productive interdisciplinary research strategies. Four epistemic factors at individual levels are examined, consisting of 1) communication, 2) specialization, 3) explanatory ideals and 4) uncertainty levels and types. A model of interdisciplinary research strategies is put forth in order to cope with these epistemic challenges. The opposing results of stable isotope analysis and faunal remains regarding diet during the Mesolithic/Neolithic-transition are presented as a case study, identifying general epistemological factors affecting the application of scientific methodologies in archaeology

IDR : a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary design in technology enhanced learning

One of the important themes that emerged from the CAL’07 conference was the failure of technology to bring about the expected disruptive effect to learning and teaching. We identify one of the causes as an inherent weakness in prevalent development methodologies. While the problem of designing technology for learning is irreducibly multi-dimensional, design processes often lack true interdisciplinarity. To address this problem we present IDR, a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary techno-pedagogical design, drawing on the design patterns tradition (Alexander, Silverstein & Ishikawa, 1977) and the design research paradigm (DiSessa & Cobb, 2004). We discuss the iterative development and use of our methodology by a pan-European project team of educational researchers, software developers and teachers. We reflect on our experiences of the participatory nature of pattern design and discuss how, as a distributed team, we developed a set of over 120 design patterns, created using our freely available open source web toolkit. Furthermore, we detail how our methodology is applicable to the wider community through a workshop model, which has been run and iteratively refined at five major international conferences, involving over 200 participants

Prilog objedinjenju perspektiva u nazivlju interdisciplinarnoga područja pametna urbana obalna održivost

In this paper, we aim to investigate the challenges of conceptual and terminological analysis in the process of the emergence of a new interdisciplinary field where terms from the existing domains like ecology, economy, tourism, biology, and geography are being used. The EU-CONEXUS project tackles the issue of Smart Urban Sustainable Coastal Development bringing together different types of stakeholders, specialists in various disciplines and technologies. This interdisciplinarity calls for the integration of knowledge from two or more disciplines so as to produce cognitive advancement. From the terminologists’ point of view, the interaction of disciplines is a necessary step towards the integration of (disciplinary) concepts as well as their organisation inside conceptual systems. This suggests that the interdisciplinary phenomena can be explained in new, more complex ways that single disciplines weren’t able to do before. In our analysis, we illustrated the process of extending the definition of concepts from the perspective of a single domain and adopting multiple interdisciplinary viewpoints on the same issue.U radu se istražuju izazovi konceptualne i terminološke analize u procesu nastanka novoga interdisciplinarnog područja u kojem se koriste nazivi iz postojećih područja poput ekologije, ekonomije, turizma, biologije i geografije. Europski sveučilišni projekt EU-CONEXUS bavi se pitanjem pametne urbane obalne održivosti povezujući brojne sudionike, raznovrsne predmetne stručnjake i tehnologije. Ovakav interdisciplinarni projekt podrazumijeva integraciju znanja iz dviju ili više disciplina s ciljem postizanja kognitivnoga napretka. S terminološkoga stajališta interakcija disciplina neophodan je korak prema integraciji (disciplinarnih) pojmova i njihovoj organizaciji unutar pojmovnih sustava. To podrazumijeva da se usko specijalizirane pojave i pojmovi mogu objasniti na nov, složeniji način nego unutar pojedinačne discipline. U radu se ilustrira proces širenja definicija izlazeći izvan granica jedne discipline i zauzimajući višestruka interdisciplinarna gledišta na istu problematiku

Untangling the Web of E-Research: Towards a Sociology of Online Knowledge

e-Research is a rapidly growing research area, both in terms of publications and in terms of funding. In this article we argue that it is necessary to reconceptualize the ways in which we seek to measure and understand e-Research by developing a sociology of knowledge based on our understanding of how science has been transformed historically and shifted into online forms. Next, we report data which allows the examination of e-Research through a variety of traces in order to begin to understand how the knowledge in the realm of e-Research has been and is being constructed. These data indicate that e-Research has had a variable impact in different fields of research. We argue that only an overall account of the scale and scope of e-Research within and between different fields makes it possible to identify the organizational coherence and diffuseness of e-Research in terms of its socio-technical networks, and thus to identify the contributions of e-Research to various research fronts in the online production of knowledge

The Impact of Research Data Sharing and Reuse on Data Citation in STEM Fields

Despite the open science movement and mandates for the sharing of research data by major funding agencies and influential journals, the citation of data sharing and reuse has not become standard practice in the various science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Advances in technology have lowered some barriers to data sharing, but it is a socio-technical phenomenon and the impact of the ongoing evolution in scholarly communication practices has yet to be quantified. Furthermore, there is need for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of author self-citation and recitation, the most often cited types of data, disciplinary differences regarding data citation and the extent of interdisciplinarity in data citation. This study employed a mixed methods approach that combined coding with semi-automatic text-searching techniques in order to assess the impact of data sharing and reuse on data citation in STEM fields. The research considered over 500,000 open research data entities, such as datasets, software and data studies, from over 350 repositories worldwide. I also examined 705 bibliographic publications with a total of 15,261 instances of data sharing, reuse, and citation the data, article, discipline and interdisciplinary levels. More specifically, I measured the phenomenon of data sharing in terms of formal data citation, frequently cited data types, and author self-citation, and I explored recitation at the levels of both data- and bibliography-level, and data reuse practices in bibliographies, associations of disciplines, and interdisciplinary contexts. The results of this research revealed, to begin with, disciplinary differences with regard to the impact of data sharing and reuse on data citation in STEM fields. This research also yielded the following additional findings regarding the citation of data by STEM researchers; 1) data sharing practices were diverse across disciplines: 2) data sharing has been increasing in recent years; 3) each discipline made use of major digital repositories; 4) these repositories took various forms depending on the discipline; 5) certain data types were more often cited in each discipline, so that the frequency distribution of the data types was highly skewed; 6) author self-citation and recitation followed similar trends at the data and bibliographic levels, but specific practices varied within each discipline; 7) associations between and across data and author self-citation and recitation at the bibliographic level were observed, with the self-citation rate differing significantly among disciplines;8) data reuse in bibliographies was rare yet diverse; 9) informal citation of data sharing and reuse at the bibliographic level was more common in certain fields, with astronomy/physics showing the highest amount (98%) and technology the lowest (69%); 10) within bibliographic publications, the documentation of data sharing and reuse occurred mainly in the main text; 11) publications in certain disciplines, such as chemistry, computing and engineering, did not attract citations from more than one field (i.e., showed no diversity); and, on the other hand,12) publications in other fields attracted a wide range of interdisciplinary data citations. This dissertation, then, contributes to the understanding of two key areas aspects of the current citation systems. First, the findings have practical implications for individual researchers, decision makers, funding agencies and publishers with regard to giving due credits to those who share their data. Second, this research has methodological implications in terms of reducing the labor required to analyze the full text of associated articles in order to identify evidence of data citation