Network Centralities-Based Approach for Evaluating Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Abstract

Interdisciplinary collaboration is considered as one of the most effective ways for solid research. The integration of sciences plays a significant role in open the horizon to researchers in producing more reliable results. The recent decade has witnessed a great revolution and a paradigm shift in involving theories from disciplines for developing methods, approaches, and algorithms that address issues in other disciplines. This phenomenon can be observed in many of the research articles in the worldwide repositories. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate and evaluate the level of collaboration among different disciplines aiming at coming up with recommendations for the research communities. This work presents a novel metric for evaluating the interdisciplinary scientific collaboration. To this end, we generate a collaboration network based on a dataset collected from different disciplines for this purpose. The proposed metric is basically inspired from complex networks concepts and measurements. The experiments show interesting results in terms of the collaboration level among different pairs of disciplines. The results also reveal the tendency of the researchers in a discipline to participate and collaborate with researchers from other disciplines. Finally, we believe that this is the first kind of work that uses this approach in evaluating interdisciplinary scientific collaboration.