Entropy-based disciplinarity indicator: role taxonomy of journals in scientific communication systems and isolation degree. Knowledge importation/exportation profiles from journals and disciplines

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new entropy-based indicator to classify journals' roles in scientific communication, revealing their disciplinary or multidisciplinary nature and their knowledge exchange profiles.

Contribution

It develops and applies a novel entropy-based disciplinarity indicator (EBDI) that characterizes journals' roles and positions within scientific communication systems.

Findings

EBDI effectively measures journals' disciplinary diversity.

The taxonomy reveals different thematic roles of journals.

Journals show varied knowledge importation/exportation profiles.

Abstract

In this research, a new indicator of disciplinarity-multidisciplinarity is developed, discussed and applied. EBDI is based on the combination of the frequency distribution of subject categories of journals citing or cited by the analysis unit and the spread and diversity of the citations among subject categories measured with Shannon-Wiener entropy. Its reproducibility, robustness and consistence are discussed. Four of the combinations of its values when applied to the cited and citing dimensions lead to a suggested taxonomy of the role that the studied unit might have in terms of the transformation of knowledge from different disciplines in the scientific communication system and its position respect a hypothetical thematic core of the discipline in which it has been classified. The indicator is applied to the journals belonging to the first quartile of JCR-SSCI 2011 Library and Information Science and an indicator-based taxonomy is applied and discussed, pointing to differential thematic roles of the journals analyzed.