This project develops R code to compute the Rao-Stirling indicators (Stirling, 2007; Porter and Rafols, 2009; Rafols and Meyer, 2010) as a measure of the degree of interdisciplinarity of research domains of institutions. For a chosen corpus of publications corresponding to a domain under study, a global interdisciplinarity index is computed. Two decompositions of this index allow to further scrutinize the mode of integration and the disciplines from which knowledge is integrated in the domain. Statistical tests are used to base the comparison of the indicators with benchmark values. This method is presented in Cassi et al. 2014 (filed in this repository in Papers).
- The different steps of the program are described in the file Steps.pdf
- R-files are in R_scripts
- Some examples of data and results are in data_integer, which you can use to check scripts
- Indicators for the WoS categories (period 2008-2012) are in data_integer/stats_results_world and in data_frac/stats_results_world
- Related articles are in Papers
Programs were written by Raphaël Champeimont.
References
Cassi, L., Mescheba, W., Turckheim, E. de, (2014). How to evaluate the degree of interdisciplinarity of an institution? Scientometrics 101:1871–1895 DOI: 10.1007/s11192-014-1280-0
Porter, A. and Rafols, I. (2009). Is science becoming more interdisciplinary? Measuring and mapping six research fields over time. Scientometrics, 81(3):719–745.
Rafols, I. and Meyer, M. (2010). Diversity and network coherence as indicators of interdisciplinarity: case studies in bionanoscience. Scientometrics, 82(2):263–287.
Stirling, A. (2007). A general framework for analysing diversity in science, technology and society. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 4(15):707–719.