A measure of similarity between scientific journals and of diversity of a list of publications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to quantify the similarity between scientific journals and to measure the diversity or interdisciplinarity of a list of publications, aiding understanding of research collaboration breadth.

Contribution

It proposes a novel two-step approach: defining journal similarity and using it to assess the diversity of publication lists, advancing methods for analyzing scientific interdisciplinarity.

Findings

A new similarity measure between journals is defined.

The method quantifies the diversity of publication lists.

It provides a tool for analyzing research collaboration interdisciplinarity.

Abstract

The aim of this note is to propose a definition of the scientific diversity and corollarly, a measure of the "interdisciplinarity" of collaborations. With respect to previous studies, the proposed approach consists of 2 steps : first, the definition of similarity between journals and second, these similarities are used to characterize the homogeneity (or, on the contrary the diversity) of a publication list (that can be for one individual or a team).