NWB2023_Field affinity

Often, studies of interdisciplinarity in publishing using reference patterns assume homogeneous relations between scientific fields. A typical definition of interdisciplinarity in reference practices is the share of references going to publications in fields other than the publishing field (See e.g., Lariviere & Gingras 2010). While this provides a rough estimate of the interplay between fields, it does not consider the general proclivity of the citing field to reference the cited field, information which provides additional information about what might be called the cognitive distance between fields. Including this information in analyses of interdisciplinarity could to a larger degree help determine whether a publication exhibits interdisciplinary citation practices or is merely drawing on intellectually proximate fields.

In this study, we present a field affinity measure that can be calculated for every combination of citing and cited field, and how this can be used to determine the degree of interdisciplinarity in the references of any given publication. The measure as defined is asymmetric between fields, meaning it is possible to determine which fields exert disproportionate intellectual influence over other fields. We will demonstrate some field affinity analyses, both on field and publication level using the Web of Science field classification scheme, although the method can be used for any field classification scheme with any degree of granularity or hierarchical class structure.

References
Lariviere, V., & Gingras, Y. (2010). On the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific impact. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(1), 126–131.