Bibliometric Analysis of Interdisciplinary Research
Report to the
Higher Education Funding Council for England
Bibliometric analysis of interdisciplinary research
Jonathan Adams, Louise Jackson, Stuart Marshall
November 2007 Contact details The reporting organisation is: Evidence Ltd 103 Clarendon Road, Leeds LS2 9DF T/ 0113 384 5680 F/ 0113 384 5874 E/ [email protected] Evidence Ltd is registered in England, Company no 4036650, VAT registration 758467185 http://www.evidence.co.uk
Bibliometric analysis of interdisciplinary research
Contents
Executive summary ………………………………………………………………………………………...1
1 Introduction...... 3
2 Defining and indexing interdisciplinarity ...... 4
3 Differential citation impact ...... 15
4 Presumed interdisciplinarity...... 23
5 Implications for bibliometric assessment and suggestions for further work ...... 26
6 Subject category assignment ...... 28
Annex A Units of Assessment clustered on journal frequency...... 31
Bibliometric analysis of interdisciplinary research
Executive summary
The research community has from time to time argued for separate assessment of interdisciplinary research, but has not found an objective definition of such work. The notion is that interdisciplinary work is treated and valued differently from other work. It is hypothesised that, being marginal to core subjects, it would be systematically cited less often. If so, this might be a problem for a metrics-based system of assessment where peer judgments that distinguish work of this nature would be absent.
In this study, we have explored this notion further by: • developing an objective description of research output according to an index of its interdisciplinarity; • testing whether there is differential citation impact across the range of interdisciplinarity; • evaluating our findings against presumed interdisciplinary outputs submitted to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and outputs assigned to Thomson Scientific® Inc’s ‘Multidisciplinary’ category; • considering options for handling interdisciplinary work within the proposed system of bibliometric- based indicators.
We collated article records supplied by Thomson Scientific to create databases of publications – source articles – for two large research-intensive UK universities. We analysed the work (other publication references) that cites and is cited by these source articles. To define whether a citation link to or from a source article was within or external to the article’s discipline, we used the Thomson journal categorisation.
We developed measures of interdisciplinarity by indexing the subject spread of the references cited by the source articles. We found that: • there was a continuum of interdisciplinarity at article level within journal categories; • the categories themselves fitted a broad but not categorical typology ranging from mono- disciplinary to multidisciplinary.
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Using the citing references, within each journal subject category we analysed the citation count (impact) of each source article. We then compared the interdisciplinarity of each article against its rebased citation impact (normalised for year of publication and subject category). We found: • no tendency for the most interdisciplinary articles to be less frequently cited on any consistent basis within or across categories; • a weak tendency for the articles with highest citation impact to be neither very monodisciplinary nor very multidisciplinary in terms of their cited references.
Our comparative analysis of presumptive interdisciplinary datasets provided only limited further information.
Our findings have implications for the assessment of interdisciplinary research: • There is no evidence to support an explicit intervention regarding articles that refer to work across a broader range of disciplines. They do not receive systematically fewer citations than more monodisciplinary publications. • If impact is to be normalised at any categorical level, there is evidence that careful attention must be paid to the choice of baseline category, especially for articles in journals that are assigned to multiple categories. The Multidisciplinary category used by Thomson does not, however, necessarily contain articles that cross more subject boundaries than research in other Thomson categories. • Since our index of interdisciplinarity may not satisfy all parties, the methodology should ideally be evaluated in due course through consultation with informed researchers.
In summary, there is no strong case on the basis of this analysis for research outputs to be treated differently for the purposes of bibliometric assessment on the grounds of interdisciplinarity. It is important, however, to exercise care in choosing the appropriate field against which to normalise the citation rates of more interdisciplinary outputs.
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1 Introduction
This study has provided a preliminary exploration of the notion that interdisciplinary work might be at a disadvantage in research evaluation because it is systematically judged in different terms to core disciplinary activity. Specifically, the project considered whether published work which is more or less interdisciplinary might receive consistently different rates of citations from other publications. Our approach was, first, to develop an objective methodology for indexing interdisciplinarity. Secondly, we tested for differential citation impact among articles with higher and lower levels of indexed interdisciplinarity. The interdisciplinary nature of an article was indexed by analysing the diversity of the subject categories from which it drew its cited references. Within each subject category, we found that articles varied across a continuum from monodisciplinary to multidisciplinary, with no obvious discontinuities or clustering. Across subject categories, we found that some tended to be more generally multidisciplinary than others. Thus it was possible to characterise the subject categories as low, medium or high diversity. When we compared interdisciplinarity with citation impact, we found no evidence that interdisciplinary work had consistently lower citation impact. Indeed, there was a tendency for many highly cited articles to be mid-range in terms of interdisciplinarity, and in most subjects there was a weak or very weak positive correlation between interdisciplinarity and citation impact. That is to say, publications which referred to articles across a broad range of subject categories were (marginally) more likely to attract a higher number of citations.
While our approach to indexing interdisciplinarity has been based on widely accepted methodologies, we suggest that their validity should be further tested against the perceptions of researchers. The remainder of this report is split into four sections: Section 2 Defining and indexing interdisciplinarity Section 3 Differential citation impact Section 4 Presumed interdisciplinarity Section 5 Implications for bibliometric assessment and suggestions for further work.
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2 Defining and indexing interdisciplinarity
This section describes how we indexed the interdisciplinarity of research outputs. There is no clear or generally accepted definition of interdisciplinarity; it is a subjective term. Many researchers believe that they are working in an interdisciplinary area. This seems possible, given that it is widely agreed that good and innovative research often draws on discoveries at the margins of more than one discipline.1 But there are no criteria for judging whether this is true. This is problematic because some researchers also believe that interdisciplinary research, working outside the core of established disciplines, is at risk of being marginalised in research evaluation and assessment. A desirable outcome might therefore be lost if the best researchers were to shun interdisciplinarity because of this perception.
How can we determine whether such a risk exists and take steps to avoid it? Rather than relying on the opinion of the researcher or an expert group, it is preferable for assessment purposes to identify an objective (measurable) characteristic that marks out interdisciplinary research. Our study began, therefore, by developing an index of interdisciplinarity.
2.1 Methodology Research outputs can be characterised at different levels of aggregation, from individual outputs to researchers and research groups or departments. For this study, we focused on the article level. Our aim was to characterise the (relative) interdisciplinarity of an individual article so that this could be compared against the article’s citation impact.
What characteristics of an article might define its interdisciplinary nature? One approach is to look at the previous work referred to by the article in question. Arguably, work claiming interdisciplinary influence would draw on, or cite, work from a greater than average range of fields. Similarly, it would be expected that work claiming interdisciplinary utility would be cited by journals in a greater than average range of fields.
1 See for example the Government’s Science and innovation investment framework, 2004-2014.
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There are precedents for this approach. Investigations into interdisciplinarity via the analysis of cited references have been carried out by Leydesdorff2 at journal level and Porter et al3 at article level. Within the bibliometric databases of Thomson is another precedent, in the way that the individual articles from multidisciplinary journals (such as Nature and Science) are categorised. These articles are individually assigned to subject categories according to the subject categories of the articles they cite and are subsequently cited by. For example, an article with many references to physics journals is probably a physics article and will be assigned to the Physics category.
Following these established approaches, the cited papers for any article should provide an appropriate source of material to evaluate the association between article and subject category. Accordingly, we based our definition of an article’s interdisciplinarity on the range of subject categories of the cited (and citing) references of the article.
Subject categories Whether a researcher’s work can be described as interdisciplinary depends on how finely or coarsely the discipline categories are defined. Fewer research outputs cross boundaries where subject categories are broad than would be the case if the categories were narrower. So, the level of interdisciplinarity identified by the analysis of cited references is determined by the level of aggregation of the subject categories.
For the purposes of the current study, we used the subject categories from the Thomson Current Contents® range of products There are 106 Current Contents categories in total, and the categories are grouped into seven discipline-specific products. A list of Current Contents® subject categories and further details about subject categorisation are included in section 6 of this report. Full journal lists and scoping notes for each Thomson category are available at http://scientific.thomson.com/mjl/
It would be quite feasible to apply our methodology at other levels of granularity. For example, it could operate at the finer level of Thomson’s Science Citation Index Expanded™ categories, or at the coarser level of UK RAE Units of Assessment (UoAs). We have shown elsewhere that several Current Contents categories map closely onto each UoA, based on RAE publications.4 For the same study, we also
2 Leydesdorff L, "Betweenness centrality" as an indicator of the "interdisciplinarity" of scientific journals. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(9), 1303-1309, 2007. 3 Porter A L, Cohen A S, Roessner J D and Perreault M, Measuring researcher interdisciplinarity. Scientometrics, 72(1) 117-147, 2007. 4 Adams J, Benchmarking international research. Nature, 396, 615-618, 1998. Adams J, Bailey T, Jackson L, Scott P, Pendlebury D and Small H, Benchmarking of the international standing of research in England: report of a consultancy study on bibliometric analysis. CPSE, University of Leeds. 108 pp, 1998. ISBN 1 901981 04 5
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calculated the similarity between UoAs, based on the frequency with which common journals were submitted to the 1996 RAE. The tree diagram at Annex A shows the similarity between UoAs and illustrates how a coarser level of aggregation would lead to lower levels of interdisciplinarity.
If the analysis were to be repeated at a coarser level of subject aggregation, although fewer articles would be identified as interdisciplinary, each article’s impact value would then be normalised against a broad (less appropriate) subject baseline. Elsewhere,5 we have explored the effect of changing the normalisation baseline and established the importance of selecting the appropriate level of ‘zoom’ for each analysis.
At Evidence we routinely use Current Contents categories as the preferred level of granularity, based on our experience of providing bibliometric analyses for a range of clients. Our databases are structured to allow a wide variety of analyses to be performed at this level. We discussed the options for introducing an alternative (finer or coarser) category system in background work for this project, but ultimately concluded that the resource implications would outweigh the possible benefits. Similarly, we reviewed the possibility of building in a measure of 'distance' between categories, but it was felt that this level of complexity was outside the scope of the project.
Defining the dataset The dataset for this analysis contained articles produced by two research-intensive UK universities during the seven-year period 1997-2003. The analysis was restricted to those outputs (sources, cited and citing articles) which had been assigned by Thomson to a Current Contents® subject category and which had been indexed as ‘articles’, ‘notes’ or ‘reviews’. In total, the dataset contained 37,000 source articles in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) subject categories.6 There were upwards of 500,000 associated cited and citing articles. The discussion and presentation of results focuses on the 88 STEM subject categories. We have included Mathematics and some Social Science categories, however, since this makes for an informative comparison.
Of the 37,000 articles, 31,000 were from University A and 7,000 from University B. Some articles were collaborative between the two. In the text that follows, most of the detailed analyses relate to outputs from University A, the larger of the two. We have included comparative data from University B to substantiate
5 Adams J, Gurney K, Jackson L, Calibrating the zoom – a test of Zitt’s hypothesis. Scientometrics, 2007, forthcoming 6 The UK Government has announced that changes to research assessment after 2008 will initially affect only STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and medicine).
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our claim that the findings are general, i.e. that they will apply to outputs from any research-intensive university. We have avoided repeating the same statements for B that we have already made for A.
We characterised the interdisciplinarity of the source articles by analysing the subject categories of their cited (and citing) articles, using only those citing articles that were published during the seven-year period 1997-2003. When calculating the citation impact for the source articles, we used citation counts to the end of 2006. We calculated the rebased impact (RBI) by normalising the number of citations a stated article had received in the context of the world average number of citations for articles published in the same subject category and year (see also section 3).
2.2 Defining interdisciplinarity indices We indexed the interdisciplinarity of each article by analysing the way in which its cited references were spread across subject categories. We prefer cited references to citing references as a first test of disciplinary spread because this best reflects authors’ perceptions of the diverse relevance of their work. It is also the case that new papers are likely to have few citations, and that articles with high citations are de facto ‘high impact’ irrespective of disciplinarity. At the outset, however, we compared both cited and citing information to evaluate consistency.
First, we defined each article’s subject category as its ‘source’ category. We chose three different approaches to measuring the reference category spread, resulting in three indices of interdisciplinarity. The first and simplest of the three indices is the proportion of cited references that lie outside the source category. The second index is a count of distinct cited categories. For the third index we used the Shannon diversity index.7 This combines information about the number of cited categories and the evenness of the spread of cites among categories; the index value increases with the number of cited categories and with greater evenness of cites among categories. Inevitably, it is the least transparent but also the most informative index. The indices and their definitions are summarised in Table 1. We calculated a further three interdisciplinarity indices for each article by analysing the subject categories of the citing references.
7 The Shannon information index originally arose out of work on information theory and has subsequently been widely used, e.g. as a measure of biodiversity.
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Table 1 Definitions of interdisciplinarity indices using analysis of cited references
Index D escription Definition Minimum value
INDEX I Proportion of cited references Number of cited references in categories other than the source 0 outside source category category divided by number of cited references.
INDEX II Count of cited categories Number of distinct categories into which cited references fall. 1
INDEX III Shannon diversity index Sum, over all categories, of: 0 the proportion of cited references in that category multiplied by the (if all cited references are in (if reference natural logarithm of the proportion of cited references in that category. the same category)
2.3 Analysing the interdisciplinarity indices
Category-level interdisciplinarity We calculated a category-level version of index II (number of cited categories) by counting the number of distinct categories cited by each of the source categories. Then from among the same set of cited references, we counted the number of categories citing each source category. There was a range of category-level interdisciplinarity, but no obvious relationship between numbers of cited and citing categories. For roughly half of the source categories, the number of cited categories exceeded the number of citing categories; for the other half, the reverse was true. Figure 1 shows these results for the 88 STEM subject categories arranged by decreasing number of cited categories. The number of categories cited by the source category is shown as a dark square. The vertical bars show the number of categories that cite the source category.
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Figure 1 Category-level analysis of cited categories and citing categories
100 Number of categories How many categories cite this category? How many categories does this category cite?
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0 AS EA MT EN PH SOC PU PH EN ON DG INF PMC HE PS CG CMP MT PE CV RE PS AR RA UR CA I/M SU CML OR HL AP GE NU OP AIC BT F PL OR GA O/ DE EN VE EMA ME IN RH AQU CMA CS SP EL OTO PS CME EE RE CIV DE NC GN S/I MU BIL BE MB MC MG EX ME PS BI OG NE CE SIA IM PH GN O C A M T C L E H P O R D I P T Y H R V D S C M B S A R T N M P D R E U L O T U L O H S H R G E C C T G C D X X L B S
Source: data, Thomson Scientific® Inc; analysis, Evidence Ltd. Categories and their abbreviated codes are listed in section 6; highlighted categories are reviewed in more detail later.
Article-level interdisciplinarity We found no clustering of articles at any particular level of interdisciplinarity within a subject category. Instead, there was normally a continuum of values for each of the three indices. The exceptions were extreme cases of monodisciplinarity where all of an article’s cited references fell within the source category. Each of the three indices addresses a slightly different aspect of the interdisciplinarity of the cited articles: the values of indices II and III are connected (though not proportional) since low numbers of cited categories mean low diversity and vice versa. Index I (the proportion of cited references outside the source category) gives differing results from the other two because it is the only one of the three that differentiates citations to articles within the source category from citations to articles outside it. It is possible for an article with minimum values for indices II and III to have a maximum value for index I. This occurs when all the cited references are in the same category, but that category is not the same as the source category. As there is overlap between some of the Current Contents® categories, references outside the source category are not necessarily outside the source field. An example of this would be where a source article assigned to the Haematology category cites articles assigned to Cardiovascular and Haematology Research. Such an article would gain a high score for index I, while its Shannon diversity index would be low. As a first step to evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of using the three indices, we compared the values of each index for each article in two different subject categories. For this comparison we chose Space Science (788 articles, a relatively monodisciplinary category) and Biochemistry and Biophysics
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(1,775 articles, a relatively multidisciplinary category). The articles were arranged in descending order of Shannon diversity with the respective values of all three indices plotted for each article. The results are illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2 Comparison of article-level interdisciplinarity using three indices
Space Science Biochemistry & Biophysics Index I and III Index II Index I and III Index II
3 20 3 40
15 30
0 10 0 20
5 10
-3 0 -3 0