"Betweenness Centrality" as an Indicator of the "Interdisciplinarity" of Scientific Journals

TL;DR

This paper investigates how betweenness centrality in social network analysis can serve as an indicator of the interdisciplinarity of scientific journals, especially within local citation environments and after normalization.

Contribution

It demonstrates that normalized betweenness centrality effectively indicates interdisciplinarity of journals in local citation contexts, extending the understanding of citation-based metrics.

Findings

Betweenness centrality correlates with interdisciplinarity in local environments.

Normalization is necessary to account for journal size effects.

Applied to fields like biotechnology and nanotechnology.

Abstract

In addition to science citation indicators of journals like impact and immediacy, social network analysis provides a set of centrality measures like degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality. These measures are first analyzed for the entire set of 7,379 journals included in the Journal Citation Reports of the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index 2004, and then also in relation to local citation environments which can be considered as proxies of specialties and disciplines. Betweenness centrality is shown to be an indicator of the interdisciplinarity of journals, but only in local citation environments and after normalization because otherwise the influence of degree centrality (size) overshadows the betweenness-centrality measure. The indicator is applied to a variety of citation environments, including policy-relevant ones like biotechnology and nanotechnology.