Uncovering diffusion trends in computer science and physics publications
| Date | 18 November 2019 |
| Published date | 18 November 2019 |
| Pages | 794-810 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/LHT-07-2018-0097 |
| Author | Tehmina Amjad,Ayesha Ali |
Uncovering diffusion trends
in computer science and
physics publications
Tehmina Amjad and Ayesha Ali
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering,
International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to trace the knowledge diffusion patterns between the publications of
top journals of computer science and physics to uncover the knowledge diffusion trends.
Design/methodology/approach –The degree of information flow between the disciplines is a measure of
entropy and received citations. The entropy gives the uncertainty in the citation distribution of a journal; the
more a journal is involved in spreading information or affected by other journals, its entropy increases. The
citations from outside category give the degree of inter-disciplinarity index as the percentage of references
made to papers of another discipline. In this study, the topic-related diffusion across computer science and
physics scholarly communication network is studied to examine how the same research topic is studied
and shared across disciplines.
Findings –For three indicators, Shannon entropy, citations outside category (COC) and research keywords, a
global view of information flow at the journal level between both disciplines is obtained. It is observed that
computer science mostly cites knowledge published in physics journals as compared to physics journals
that cite knowledge within the field.
Originality/value –To the best of the authors’knowledge, this is the first study that traces knowledge
diffusion trends between computer science and physics publications at journal level using entropy, COC and
research keywords.
Keywords Computer science, Information flow, Physics
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Knowledge is disseminated and spread among various social sectors and entities
(Yan, 2014a). Contemporary knowledge is organized through disciplines which are the
intellectual and social structures. The diffusion of disciplines uncovers the overlapped
boundaries and similarities, and as a result, new cross-fields may arise as a significant
variation that may affect the recognized order of knowledge. Researchers are not the only
source to disseminate knowledge from one field to another; tools, methods and research
articles play an important role as the carriers of knowledge between disciplines. The vital
components in the progression of knowledge are the cross-citations across disciplines.
Knowledge is diffused within and across the disciplines by publications (publishing in other
journals or research area) or by citations (citing the articles published in other disciplines).
The quantifiable revisions of disciplines have used bibliographic information, for example,
co-authorship (Amjad et al., 2016, 2017, 2018; Amjad, Daud, Che, Akram, 2015; Newman, 2004;
Oh et al., 2005), co-citation (Oh et al., 2005; White and McCain, 1998), and reference relations
(Borgman and Rice, 1992; Cronin and Meho, 2008; Cronin and Pearson, 1990). The research and
development based tasksin higher educationalinstitutes are coupled with knowledge creation,
transfer and diffusion and they enhance the knowledge diffusion process (Chen et al., 2017).
The process of information evolution from discovery-oriented science to applications-oriented
science and vice versa detects evolutions between science and technology (Hu and Rousseau,
2018). These earlier endeavors have altogether enhanced our com prehension of the intellectual
and social closeness of disciplines. This allows the scholars, practitioners and the general
society to gain understandings of the composition of disciplines (Boyack et al., 2005; Rosvall
Library Hi Tech
Vol. 37 No. 4, 2019
pp. 794-810
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0737-8831
DOI 10.1108/LHT-07-2018-0097
Received 25 July 2018
Revised 19 December 2018
15 March 2019
Accepted 18 March 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0737-8831.htm
794
LHT
37,4
and Bergstrom, 2007). While earlier citation-based revisions h ave uncovered patterns of
inter-organizational, inter-disciplinarity and international knowledge transfer, they lack a
complete and dynamic examination of the question how disciplinary knowledge flows. In
today’s research communities, the boundaries across the disciplines are reducing because of
overlap of disciplines and collaboration of researchers across these boundaries.
Inter-disciplinarity collaboration has become a norm in academic practices (Amjad, Ding,
Daud, Xu, Malic, 2015). Thus, themotivation behind the research is to study and examine the
impact of interdisciplinary collaborations, whichis principally indispensable when it comes to
facing the challenges of growth in the scientific literature that is produced by scholarly
societies. Information dissemination is a process which cannot be directly observed by the
scholars. Therefore, this study aims to uncover the hidden diffusion trends among disciplines.
As a testbed, thefields of computer science and physicsare selected to investigate the impact
and diffusion patterns across disciplines at the journal level.
The goal of this study is:
(1) to investigate the inter-disciplinarity and finding the assimilation level in top 12
journals of computer science and physics;
(2) to find how information can spread between computer science and physics
publications; and
(3) to examine how different research keywords exhibit different diffusion patterns
within and outside the discipline.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 gives an overview of the related
literature, Section 3 describes the research methodology. In Section 4, the results are
discussed and Section 5 finally concludes the work and gives future directions.
2. Literature review
There is a lot of empirical and theoretical literature on inter-disciplinarity research.
Bibliometric and diversity indices are utilized to measure the interaction between disciplines
researchers at the journal level. Literature includes the study of subfields of disciplines,
the impact of inter-disciplinarity research on citations and status of researchers. Based on
the type, we have divided the studied literature into two sections:
(1) inter-disciplinarity research; and
(2) topic-related diffusion.
2.1 Inter-disciplinarity research
A study was conducted on knowledge exchange between 15 disciplines by analyzing cross
disciplines citation of 643,000 articles published in 1980–1999 holding 11m references (Rinia
et al., 2002). The subject-to-subject percentage of references is calculated, out of which
physics shows the highest self-citations rate and shares 0.4 percent literature with computer
science. In total, 7.9 percent of references are from computer science to physics. Ortega and
Antell (2006) examine the cross-disciplinary citations (CDC) of physics, chemistry and
biological sciences departments of 12 universities in 1985–2000. Their results show that 30
to 45 percent of all citations to physics, biological sciences and chemistry originate from
other fields. For physics, the CDC increases in 1985 and 1990 and decreases in 1995 and
2000. Their CDC rates of physics for the four years is 36.4 percent, 39.0 percent for
Chemistry and Biological Science holds 36.7 percent citations outside disciplines.
Cronin and Meho (2008) presented the information flow between Information Studies and
other disciplines. The consequences of their examination uncover the degree to which
Information Studies import and export knowledge from other disciplines. The citation data
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Uncovering
diffusion
trends
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