Measuring Interdisciplinarity of a Given Body of Research

Identifying interdisciplinary research topics is an essential subject, not only for research policy but also research funding agencies. Previous research was constructed on measuring interdisciplinarity mainly at the macro level of research, such as Web of Science subject category and journal. However, these studies lack analysis at the micro level of the current science system. It means few studies have analyzed interdisciplinarity at the level of publications. To cover this gap, we introduce an approach for measuring interdisciplinarity at the level of micro research topics. The research topics are clustered by direct citation relations in a large scale database. According to the characteristics of boundary-crossing research, we provide an alternative approach to measure interdisciplinarity. Comparing with the widely used Rao-Stirring indicator (Integration score), we found that the results obtained by two indicators of interdisciplinarity have a strong correlation, thus we believe that this approach could effectively identify boundary-crossing research topics. Conference Topic Indicators