Does diversity of papers affect their citations? Evidence from American Physical Society Journals

TL;DR

This study investigates how the interdisciplinarity of papers, measured by diversity indices based on PACS codes, correlates with citation counts in physical sciences, revealing that moderate diversity papers tend to receive more citations.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel application of the Weitzman diversity index to measure paper and author diversity in physical sciences and analyzes its correlation with citation impact.

Findings

Authors with high diversity are increasing over time.

Moderate diversity papers receive the most citations.

Both low and high diversity papers tend to receive fewer citations.

Abstract

In this work, we study the correlation between interdisciplinarity of papers within physical sciences and their citations by using meta data of articles published in American Physical Society's Physical Review journals between 1985 to 2012. We use the Weitzman diversity index to measure the diversity of papers and authors, exploiting the hierarchical structure of PACS (Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme) codes. We find that the fraction of authors with high diversity is increasing with time, where as the fraction of least diversity are decreasing, and moderate diversity authors have higher tendency to switch over to other diversity groups. The diversity index of papers is correlated with the citations they received in a given time period from their publication year. Papers with lower and higher end of diversity index receive lesser citations than the moderate diversity papers.