Betweenness and diversity in journal citation networks as measures of interdisciplinarity—A tribute to Eugene Garfield
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Date
2017-10-04
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Abstract
Journals were central to Eugene Garfield’s research interests. Among other
things, journals are considered as units of analysis for bibliographic databases such as the
Web of Science and Scopus. In addition to providing a basis for disciplinary classifications
of journals, journal citation patterns span networks across boundaries to variable extents.
Using betweenness centrality (BC) and diversity, we elaborate on the question of how to
distinguish and rank journals in terms of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, however, is
difficult to operationalize in the absence of an operational definition of disciplines; the
diversity of a unit of analysis is sample-dependent. BC can be considered as a measure of
multi-disciplinarity. Diversity of co-citation in a citing document has been considered as an
indicator of knowledge integration, but an author can also generate trans-disciplinary—that
is, non-disciplined—variation by citing sources from other disciplines. Diversity in the
bibliographic coupling among citing documents can analogously be considered as diffusion
or differentiation of knowledge across disciplines. Because the citation networks in
the cited direction reflect both structure and variation, diversity in this direction is perhaps
the best available measure of interdisciplinarity at the journal level. Furthermore, diversity
is based on a summation and can therefore be decomposed; differences among (sub)sets
can be tested for statistical significance. In the appendix, a general-purpose routine for
measuring diversity in networks is provided.
Description
Keywords
journal, interdisciplinarity, betweenness centrality, diversity
Citation
Leydesdorff, L., Wagner, C.S. & Bornmann, L. Scientometrics (2018) 114: 567. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2528-2