The relationship between the level of interdisciplinarity of journals and scientific impact – a Hungarian case study

Abstract

The evaluation of interdisciplinarity and its effect on research impact is prevalent in modern science. However, the evaluation of interdisciplinarity at the level of individual research papers is inconsistent with several different indicators used and is based predominantly on examinations of paper citations. Moreover, without considering the limitations of individual scientific disciplines,
examinations of interdisciplinarity can present a distorted understanding of the research impact of a given paper or field. To overcome this issue, the paper established three different Levels of Interdisciplinarity based on the Web of Science Schema of research categories and assigned research areas at the level of individual journals where research papers were published. The
relation of journals’ Level of Interdisciplinarity to the research impact at the level of individual research papers (Impact Factor, Field Normalized Citation Impact) in a research area-dependent manner were analysed. Results demonstrate that the relationship between the Level of Interdisciplinarity and research impact varies by scientific field. Moreover, the study shows that the analysis
of interdisciplinarity and research impact is less effective at an aggregated, institutional level and highlights the importance of disciplinary specialisations. The major advantage of this approach is that the measurement is independent of the changing number of citing papers and temporally changing citation categories.