Analyzing Interdisciplinarity and Scientists’ Academic Impacts
Li Dong1, Tong Shouchuan1, Li Jiang2()
1Department of Information Resource Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China 2School of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China
[Objective] This paper explores the relationship between the scientists’ interdisciplinary knowledge and their academic impacts. [Methods] First, we collected 200 candidates from the 2016 National Natural Science Foundation Outstanding Youth Program and their articles indexed by the Web of Science. Then, we retrieved interdisciplinary co-authorship and citation data. Third, we used Brillouin’s index as a measure of interdisciplinarity and h index as a measure of academic influence. Finally, we calculated the correlation coefficients between interdisciplinarity and academic influence. [Results] We found no significant correlation between inter-disciplinary collaboration and academic influence except for the field of biology, and no significant correlation between interdisciplinary citations and academic influence except the areas of medicine or biology. [Limitations] Deciding a scientist’s discipline based on his/her affiliation might be biased. [Conclusions] A scientist’s interdisciplinary collaborations and citations are not necessarily correlated to his/her academic influence.
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