Mapping Interdisciplinarity at the Interfaces between the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index

TL;DR

This paper combines citation data from science and social science indexes to map journal interdisciplinarity, revealing the structure and functions of journals at the intersection and providing new visualization and measurement tools.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze and visualize interdisciplinarity using combined citation data and social network analysis metrics.

Findings

Mapping of journals at the interface reveals their structural roles.

Betweenness centrality correlates with interdisciplinarity levels.

Combined data offers new insights into journal functions and specialties.

Abstract

The two Journal Citation Reports of the Science Citation Index 2004 and the Social Science Citation Index 2004 were combined in order to analyze and map journals and specialties at the edges and in the overlap between the two databases. For journals which belong to the overlap (e.g., Scientometrics), the merger mainly enriches our insight into the structure which can be obtained from the two databases separately; but in the case of scientific journals which are more marginal in either database, the combination can provide a new perspective on the position and function of these journals (e.g., Environment and Planning B-Planning and Design). The combined database additionally enables us to map citation environments in terms of the various specialties comprehensively. Using the vector-space model, visualizations are provided for specialties that are parts of the overlap (information science, science & technology studies). On the basis of the resulting visualizations, "betweenness"--a measure from social network analysis--is suggested as an indicator for measuring the interdisciplinarity of journals.