Abstract
Bibliometric methods are relevant for a range of applications and disciplines. The majority of existing scholarship investigating citation and reference patterns focuses on studying research impact. This article presents a new approach to studying the curriculum using bibliometric methods. Through a review of existing definitions and measures of interdisciplinary research and standardization procedures for comparing disciplinary citations, three measures were considered: variety, balance and dissimilarity. Bibliometric algorithms for assessing these measures were adopted and modified for a curriculum context, and three interdisciplinary programs were investigated that span undergraduate and graduate degrees. Data objects were course syllabi, and required references were coded for disciplinary affiliations. The results indicated that—despite purportedly pursuing a singular goal in the same academic unit—the programs employed distinct citation patterns. Variety was highest in the master’s program, and balance was highest in the doctoral program. Dissimilarity was highest in the doctoral program, yet a novel technique for disambiguating disciplinary composition was implemented to improve interpretation. The analysis yielded unexpected findings, which underscore the value of a systematic approach in advancing beyond discourse by harnessing bibliometric techniques to reveal underlying curricula structure. This study contributed a well-grounded bibliometric method that can be replicated in future studies.
Highlights
This paper contributes an applied bibliometric approach to measuring interdisciplinarity within higher education curriculum
This study offers five important contributions that advance the relevance of bibliometrics in the study of interdisciplinarity
The methods innovated in this study propose and test a set of procedures designed to translate existing bibliometric techniques from studying interdisciplinarity within a research context to a curriculum context
Summary
This paper contributes an applied bibliometric approach to measuring interdisciplinarity within higher education curriculum. The method is implemented in the assessment of intended curriculum for three academic programs within the same school: bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree-granting programs. These programs share an intention to be interdisciplinary. The extent of interdisciplinarity has not previously been assessed, and this paper applies bibliometric techniques to study interdisciplinarity within the curriculum. A robust set of extant studies attends to measurement and operationalization of interdisciplinarity. This body of scholarship provides a summary of definitions for interdisciplinarity and description of its typical measurements. Approaches to coding and analyzing these measures are summarized in the literature review section of this paper
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