Abstract
Sustainability science is, per se, a topic that is inherently interdisciplinarity and oriented towards the resolution of societal problems. In this paper, we propose a classification of scientific journals that composes the journal category “Green and Sustainable Science and Technology” in the period 2014–2018 through the entropy-based disciplinarity indicator (EBDI). This indicator allows the classification of scientific journals in four types based on the citing and cited dimensions: knowledge importer, knowledge exporter, disciplinary and interdisciplinarity. Moreover, the relationship between this taxonomy and the JCR bibliometric indicators and its predictive capacity of the taxonomy is explored through a CHAID tree. As well, relations between the Web of Science categories, journals and taxonomy are explored by the co-occurrence of categories and correspondence analysis. Results suggest that the great majority of journals in this field are specialized or interdisciplinary. However, over the 5-year period proposed in this study, interdisciplinary journals tend to be far more stable than specialized ones. The decision tree has shown that the number of citations is the variable with the greatest discriminating capacity.
Highlights
Scientific disciplines have evolved as such through a complex process only from the 1700’s onwards, followed by an increased speed in the delineation of disciplinary boundaries in the XIX and XX centuries (Abramo et al, 2019)
Interdisciplinary Research (IDR) acronym seemingly appeared for the first time in a 1976 article in the IEEE Transactions on Engineering Managament (Nilles, 1976), the issue of multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and specialization had already been present in the academic discussion for more than a decade (Huutoniemi et al, 2010)
We find two journals that are importers on the field (‘Energy efficiency’ and ‘International Journal of Green Energy’), while two are exporters (‘International Journal of Sustainability’ in ‘Higher Education and Sustainability Science’)
Summary
Scientific disciplines have evolved as such through a complex process only from the 1700’s onwards, followed by an increased speed in the delineation of disciplinary boundaries in the XIX and XX centuries (Abramo et al, 2019). Post-war developments in university and research structures gave rise to ‘Big science’ in a broad sense (Weinberg, 1961) and, given the diverse type of scientific and technical types of knowledge required for the attainment of such projects’ objectives, this was followed by an increase in the interest of inter / multidisciplinarity. IDR was initially addressed from the perspective of research policy and management. IDR acronym seemingly appeared for the first time in a 1976 article in the IEEE Transactions on Engineering Managament (Nilles, 1976), the issue of multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and specialization had already been present in the academic discussion for more than a decade (Huutoniemi et al, 2010). Addressing real-world issues is clearly related to informing policy decisions
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