Identification of interdisciplinary research based upon co-cited journals
| Pages | 68-77 |
| Published date | 01 July 2019 |
| Date | 01 July 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/CC-10-2018-0021 |
| Author | Marco van Veller |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
Identification of interdisciplinary research
based upon co-cited journals
Marco van Veller
Wageningen University & Research –Library, Wageningen, The Netherlands
Abstract
Purpose –This paper aims to the identification of journal articles that probably report on interdisciplinary research at Wagenin gen University &
Research (WUR).
Design/methodology/approach –For identification of interdisciplinary research, an analysis is performed on journals from which articles have
been cited in articles (co-)authored by WUR staff. The journals with cited articles are inventoried from the reference lists of the WUR articles. For
each WUR article, a mean dissimilarity is calculated between the journal in which it has been published and the journals inventorie d from the
reference lists. Dissimilarities are derived from a large matrix with similarity values between journals, calculated from co-occurrence of these
journals in the WUR articles’reference lists.
Findings –For 21,191 WUR articles published between 2006 and 2015 in 2,535 journals mean dissi milarities have been calculated. The analysis
shows that WUR articles with high mean dissimilarities often are published in multidisciplinary journals. Also, WUR articles with high mean
dissimilarities are found in non-multidisciplinary (research field-specific) journals. For these articles (w ith high mean dissimilarities), this paper shows
that citations are often made to more various research fields than for articles with lower mean dissimilaritie s.
Originality/value –Identification of articles reporting on interdisciplinary research may be important to WUR policy for strate gic purposes or for the
evaluation of researchers or groups. Also, this analysis enables to identify journals with high mean dissi milarities (due to WUR articles citing more
various research fields). Identification of these journals with a more interdisciplinary scope can be important for collection management by the
library.
Keywords Journals, Interdisciplinary research, Citations, References, Multidisciplinary journals, Research fields
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Wageningen University & Research (WUR)is an international
research and knowledge center in The Netherlands that
consists of a university and various research institutes. The
mission of WUR is to explore thepotential of nature to improve
the quality of life (WUR, 2016). To accomplish this, various
research activities are undertaken by 6,500 staff and 10,000
students.
Staff and students present their research in publications of
various kinds (e.g. reports, books, book chapters, conference
proceedings, journal articles, etc.). Once registered in the
Research Information System (RIS) of WUR, these publications
are included in WUR’s institutional repository (called Staff
Publications). Of the publications produced by authors from
WUR about one third consists of (refereed) articles in scholarly
journals (Staff publications, 2017).
To get an idea of the research topics that are investigated at
WUR, 3,020 articles that have been published in 2015 are
collected from Web of Science (Clarivate analytics, 2017). To
overcome a time lag in registration (in the RIS of WUR) and
indexation (in Web of Science) and have a complete overview
of articles, it is chosen to collect the WUR authored articles
published in 2015. From the bibliographic data (title and
abstract) of these articlesa term map based on text data is made
with VOSviewer(Eck and Waltman, 2016). Figure 1 shows this
term map.
The term map shows that e.g. gene, protein, plant, disease,
ecosystem, farmer and climatechange are important terms that
WUR authors used in their articles. These terms represent a
selection of the most important topics that have been
investigated at WUR in 2015. Further, the map in Figure 1
shows 24 clusters of term maps. Depending on the settings of
VOSviewer while calculating the term map, the number of
clusters may vary. Further examination of some of the clusters
show that they each indicate a particular research field that is
examined at WUR (e.g. the red cluster corresponds with
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on
Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/2514-9326.htm
Collection and Curation
38/3 (2019) 68–77
Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 2514-9326]
[DOI 10.1108/CC-10-2018-0021]
© Marco van Veller. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This
article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0)
licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative
works of this article (for both commercial & non-commercial purposes),
subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full
terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons,org/licences/
by/4.0/legalcode
The author thanks wishes to thank Ek’abo Omwana for inspiration on the
writing of this paper. Further the author wants to thank Markku A Laitinen
for aid in the publication process of this paper.
Received 4 October 2018
Revised 20 February 2019
Accepted 4 March 2019
68
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