Characterizing Interdisciplinarity of Researchers and Research Topics Using Web Search Engines

Details Characterizing Interdisciplinarity of Researchers and Research Topics Using Web Search Engines Characterizing Interdisciplinarity of Researchers and Research Topics Using Web Search Engines

2012-01-17

arxiv.org/abs/1201.3592v1

Computer Science

Social and Information Networks

19 pages, 7 figures. Under review

Scientific paper

Researchers' networks have been subject to active modeling and analysis. Earlier literature mostly focused on citation or co-authorship networks reconstructed from annotated scientific publication databases. General-purpose web search engines have also been utilized recently. However, the scope of those earlier studies was limited to networks reconstructed from data taken from a particular domain. Here we reconstructed, using web search engines, a network representing the relatedness of researchers to their peers as well as various research topics. Relatedness between researchers and research topics was characterized by visibility boost-increase of a researcher's visibility by focusing on a particular topic. We calculated correlations between visibility boosts by research topics and researchers' interdisciplinarity at individual and social levels, i.e., diversity of topics related to them and their centrality in the researchers' network, respectively. Our preliminary results suggested that visibility boosts by network-related and other topics had positive correlations with researchers' social-level interdisciplinarity, while topics' correlations with researchers' individuallevel and social-level interdisciplinarities were nearly independent from each other. These findings suggest that the notion of "interdisciplinarity" multi-dimensional concept that should be evaluated using multiple assessment means.

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