Measuring diversity of research output: do the authors’ field classification and the reference list approaches converge?

Abstract

This study investigates the convergence of two bibliometric approaches to the measurement of interdisciplinary research: one based on analyzing disciplinary diversity in the reference list of publications, the other based on the disciplinary diversity of authors of publications. In particular we measure the variety, balance, disparity and integrated diversity index of, respectively, single author, multi author single field, and multi author multi field publications. We find that, in general, the diversity of the reference list grows with the number of fields reflected in a paper’s byline and, to a lesser extent, with the number of authors given the same number of fields. Further, we find that when fields belonging to different disciplines are reflected in the byline, the disparity in the reference list is accordingly higher. However, this general tendency varies across different disciplines.