Betweenness and Diversity in Journal Citation Networks as Measures of Interdisciplinarity -- A Tribute to Eugene Garfield --

Journals were central to Eugene Garfield's research interests. Among other things, journals are considered as units of analysis for bibliographic databases such as the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. In addition to disciplinary classifications of journals, journal citation patterns span networks across boundaries to variable extents. Using betweenness centrality (BC) and diversity, we elaborate on the question of how to distinguish and rank journals in terms of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, however, is difficult to operationalize in the absence of an operational definition of disciplines, the diversity of a unit of analysis is sample-dependent. BC can be considered as a measure of multi-disciplinarity. Diversity of co-citation in a citing document has been considered as an indicator of knowledge integration, but an author can also generate trans-disciplinary--that is, non-disciplined--variation by citing sources from other disciplines. Diversity in the bibliographic coupling among citing documents can analogously be considered as diffusion of knowledge across disciplines. Because the citation networks in the cited direction reflect both structure and variation, diversity in this direction is perhaps the best available measure of interdisciplinarity at the journal level. Furthermore, diversity is based on a summation and can therefore be decomposed, differences among (sub)sets can be tested for statistical significance. In an appendix, a general-purpose routine for measuring diversity in networks is provided

Teaching and Learning in Interdisciplinary Higher Education: A Systematic Review

Interdisciplinary higher education aims to develop boundary-crossing skills, such as interdisciplinary thinking. In the present review study, interdisciplinary thinking was defined as the capacity to integrate knowledge of two or more disciplines to produce a cognitive advancement in ways that would have been impossible or unlikely through single disciplinary means. It was considered as a complex cognitive skill that constituted of a number of subskills. The review was accomplished by means of a systematic search within four scientific literature databases followed by a critical analysis. The review showed that, to date, scientific research into teaching and learning in interdisciplinary higher education has remained limited and explorative. The research advanced the understanding of the necessary subskills of interdisciplinary thinking and typical conditions for enabling the development of interdisciplinary thinking. This understanding provides a platform from which the theory and practice of interdisciplinary higher education can move forwar

Technology-enhanced learning as a site for interdisciplinary research

This briefing on Interdisciplinary Research is the fifth publication of its kind emerging from the Technology Enhanced Learning Research programme (TEL). TEL is a £12m programme running from 2007-2012 with eight large interdisciplinary projects aiming to combine technological and pedagogical expertise to improve outcomes for learners. The programme is funded jointly by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. TEL also commissions analyses of key theoretical, practical and policy issues across and beyond the eight projects, and in the wider TEL field

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

Exploring the Role of Interdisciplinarity in Physics: Success, Talent and Luck

Although interdisciplinarity is often touted as a necessity for modern research, the evidence on the relative impact of sectorial versus to interdisciplinary science is qualitative at best. In this paper we leverage the bibliographic data set of the American Physical Society to quantify the role of interdisciplinarity in physics, and that of talent and luck in achieving success in scientific careers. We analyze a period of 30 years (1980-2009) tagging papers and their authors by means of the Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme (PACS), to show that some degree of interdisciplinarity is quite helpful to reach success, measured as a proxy of either the number of articles or the citations score. We also propose an agent-based model of the publication-reputation-citation dynamics reproduces the trends observed in the APS data set. On the one hand, the results highlight the crucial role of randomness and serendipity in real scientific research; on the other, they shed light on a counter-intuitive effect indicating that the most talented authors are not necessarily the most successful ones.Comment: 21 pages, 19 figure

Interdisciplinarity in Technology Enhanced Learning: An Interview Study

This paper explores the influence of the concept of interdisciplinarity on the work of educational technologists and others involved in technology-enhanced learning (TEL) research. There is a growing recognition of the need for interdisciplinarity in solving complex research problems in many areas of science. Technology-enhanced learning is a relatively young area of research adopting a multidisciplinary approach to investigating the use of technologies for learning. This makes it a field that is worthy of exploration in terms of how the ways of working developed by its practitioners inform our understanding of the challenges of the field as well as its benefits. This paper reporting on work commissioned by the Joint Research Councils’ programme on Technology Enhanced Learning provides a discussion of the growing literature on this topic, and a study of the working practices of academics in TEL research. An interview study of 18 participants was conducted as part of the project. The paper reports on the key findings from the interviews and concludes with some practical suggestions to help participants deal with the challenges posed by interdisciplinary working in TEL research

Interdisciplinarity and research on local issues: evidence from a developing country

This paper explores the relationship between interdisciplinarity and research pertaining to local issues. Using Colombian publications from 1991 until 2011 in the Web of Science, we investigate the relationship between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the local orientation of the articles. We find that a higher degree of interdisciplinarity in a publication is associated with a greater emphasis on Colombian issues. In particular, our results suggest that research that combines cognitively disparate disciplines, what we refer to as distal interdisciplinarity, tends to be associated with more local focus of research. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of policies aiming to foster the local socio-economic impact of research in developing countries.Comment: 24 page