Keyword occurrences and journal specialization

Abstract

Since the borders of disciplines change over time and vary across communities and geographies, they can be expressed at different levels of granularity, making it challenging to find a broad consensus about the measurement of interdisciplinarity. This study contributes to this debate by proposing a journal specialization index based on the level of repetitiveness of keywords appearing in their articles. Keywords represent one of the most essential items for filtering the vast amount of research available. If chosen correctly, they can help to identify the central concept of the paper and, consequently, to couple it with manuscripts related to the same field or subfield of research. Based on these universally recognized features of article keywords, the study proposes measuring the specialization of a journal by counting the number of times that a keyword is Queryrepeated in a journal on average (Sj). The basic assumption underlying the proposal of a journal specialization index is that the keywords may approximate the article’s topic and that the higher the number of papers in a journal based on a topic, the higher the level of specialization of that journal. The proposed specialization metric is not invulnerable to a set of limitations, among which the most relevant seems to be the lack of a standard practice regarding the number and consistency of keywords appearing in each article.