Measuring Scientific Broadness

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to quantify scientific broadness through semantic analysis of researchers' publications, applied to arXiv papers, providing a new metric for assessing research diversity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to measure scientific broadness using semantic analysis, filling a gap in quantifying research diversity.

Findings

Successful application to arXiv data

Quantitative measure of scientific broadness

Insights into researcher diversity

Abstract

Who has not read letters of recommendations that comment on a student's `broadness' and wondered what to make of it? We here propose a way to quantify scientific broadness by a semantic analysis of researchers' publications. We apply our methods to papers on the open-access server arXiv.org and report our findings.