Interdisciplinary research detection by citation indicators

Methodology to analyze a vast amount of scientific information is becoming an indispensable component of R&D management. Bibliometrics are one of powerful tools for overviewing scientific activities in a manner that individuals cannot handle. However, it sometimes misses minor but essential part of scientific activities such as interdisciplinary research. Complex issues we face such as sustainability and aging society cannot be solved within an academic discipline and interdisciplinary research and transdisciplinary expertise are essential. In this paper, we measure interdisciplinarity of academic papers by a set of indicators that are obtained by citation network analysis. Betweenness centrality, diversity of references, and diversity of references of references were used to measure interdisciplinarity. A case study was performed in sustainability science to evaluate those indicators. These indicators can detect interdisciplinary papers among a pile of papers. But there is a difference in extracted papers according to the indicators. Characteristics of each indicator were discussed.