Measuring the interdisciplinarity of research topics

Abstract

Measuring interdisciplinarity is an essential but challenging task. Studies of interdisciplinarity with regard to the entire science system at the level of topics are rarely performed. The present study aims to address this limitation by identifying interdisciplinary topics from an algorithmically generated publication-level classification. The indicator of interdisciplinarity proposed in the study is based on the definition of interdisciplinary research by the Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research and Committee on Science. In a case study, we selected a research topic with a high degree of interdisciplinarity, according to the proposed indicator, and associated with the Web of Science subject category “Information Science & Library Science”. Our results suggest that the topic is indeed interdisciplinary. The major contribution of this work is that application of its methodology might provide insight into current interdisciplinary topics.