[Sigmetrics] Betweenness and Diversity in Journal Citation Networks as Measures of Interdisciplinarity -- preprint

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Betweenness and Diversity in Journal Citation Networks as Measures of
Interdisciplinarity -- A Tribute to Eugene Garfield
<https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03272> 


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 (WoS) and Scopus. In addition to
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 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 an appendix, a general-purpose routine for measuring
diversity in networks is provided. 

 

Loet Leydesdorff, Caroline S. Wagner, and Lutz Bornmann

 

Available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03272 

** apologies for cross-postings

 

  _____  

Loet Leydesdorff 

Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

 <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net> loet at leydesdorff.net ;
<http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 
Associate Faculty,  <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> SPRU, University of
Sussex; 

Guest Professor  <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/> Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou;
Visiting Professor,  <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html> ISTIC,
Beijing;

Visiting Fellow,  <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/> Birkbeck, University of London; 

 <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en>
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

 

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