On the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact

This paper analyzes the effect of interdisciplinarity on the scientific impact of individual papers. Using all the papers published in Web of Science in 2000, we define the degree of interdisciplinarity of a given paper as the percentage of its cited references made to journals of other disciplines. We show that, although for all disciplines combined there is no clear correlation between the level of interdisciplinarity of papers and their citation rates, there are nonetheless some disciplines in which a higher level of interdisciplinarity is related to a higher citation rates. For other disciplines, citations decline as interdisciplinarity grows. One characteristic is visible in all disciplines: highly disciplinary and highly interdisciplinary papers have a low scientific impact. This suggests that there might be an optimum of interdisciplinarity beyond which the research is too dispersed to find its niche and under which it is too mainstream to have high impact. Finally, the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact is highly determined by the citation characteristics of the disciplines involved: papers citing citation intensive disciplines are more likely to be cited by those disciplines and, hence, obtain higher citation scores than papers citing non citation intensive disciplines.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. Forthcoming in JASIS

Bibliometric Analysis of Research on Mental Health in the Workplace in Canada 1991-2002

This paper uses the Medline biomedical papers database to measure scientific production on mental health in the workplace (MHWP) during the 1991-2002 period at the world, Canadian, provincial, urban, institutional and researcher levels. The level of scientific output has doubled at the world level and tripled at the Canadian level during the last 12 years. At the provincial level, Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta are leading in absolute number of papers. Ontario largely dominates both in terms of output and on a per capita basis. At the level of cities, Toronto and Montreal are the largest producers of papers on MHWP. The most important institutions in terms of papers on MHWP are McMaster University, Université de Montréal, the University of Toronto, the University of British Columbia and the University of Western Ontario. The universities with the largest number of active researchers in MHWP are McMaster University, Université Laval and York University

"Please, Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" : The Role of Argumentation in a Sociology of Academic

Academic debates are so frequent and omnipresent in most disciplines, particularly the social sciences and humanities, it seems obvious that disagreements are bound to occur. The aim of this paper is to show that whereas the agent who perceives his/her contribution as being misunderstood locates the origin of the communication problem on the side of the receiver who “misinterpret