The distinctiveness of author interdisciplinarity: A long-neglected issue in research on interdisciplinarity

Abstract

In the research on interdisciplinarity (RID), measures for evaluating the interdisciplinarity of scientific entities (e.g., papers, authors, journals or research areas) have been proposed for a long time. The author interdisciplinarity is very different from the other types of interdisciplinarity because of the complex interpersonal relationships between the connected authors. However, previous work has failed to uncover the distinctiveness of author interdisciplinarity and has regarded it as equivalent to other types of interdisciplinarity. In this work, an extended Rao–Stirling diversity measure is proposed, which incorporates the co-author network and a network similarity measure to specifically evaluate the author interdisciplinarity. Moreover, betweenness centrality is used for improving network similarity measure, because of its intrinsic advantage of expressing how an entity loads on different factors in a network, which is highly in line with the characteristic of interdisciplinarity. An experiment on the papers about Public Administration in the Web of Science is conducted; based on the final results, a deeper investigation is performed into by typical authors. The work proposes a novel idea for measuring author interdisciplinarity, which can promote the study of interdisicplinarity measuring in RID.