Measuring interdisciplinarity of research articles: An analysis of inter-relatedness of different parameters

Abstract

With evolution of knowledge disciplines and cross fertilization of ideas, research outputs reported as scientific papers are now becoming more and more interdisciplinary. An interdisciplinary research work usually involves ideas and approaches from multiple disciplines of knowledge applied to solve a specific problem. In many cases the interdisciplinary areas eventually emerge as full-fledged disciplines. In the last two decades, several approaches have been proposed to measure the Interdisciplinarity of a scientific article, such as propositions based on authorship, references, set of keywords etc. Among all these approaches, reference-set based approach is most widely used. The diversity of knowledge in the reference set has been measured with three parameters, namely variety, balance, and disparity. Different studies tried to combine these measures in one way or other to propose an aggregate measure of interdisciplinarity, called integrated diversity. However, there is a lack of understanding on inter-relations between these parameters. This paper tries to look into inter-relatedness between the three parameters by analytical study on an important interdisciplinary research area, Internet of Things (IoT). Research articles in IoT, as obtained from Web of Science for the year 2018 have been analyzed to compute the three measures and understand their inter-relatedness. Results obtained show that variety and balance are negatively correlated, variety and disparity do not show a stable relatedness and balance and disparity are negatively correlated. Further, the integrated diversity measure is negatively correlated with variety and weakly positively correlated with balance and disparity. The results imply that the composite integrated diversity measure may not be a suitably constructed composite measure of interdisciplinarity.