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The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers
- Source :
- PLoS ONE, PLoS ONE, Vol 15, Iss 4, p e0230325 (2020)
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2020.
-
Abstract
- There is demand from science funders, industry, and the public that science should become more risk-taking, more out-of-the-box, and more interdisciplinary. Is it possible to tell how interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box scientific papers are, or which papers are mainstream? Here we use the bibliographic coupling network, derived from all physics papers that were published in the Physical Review journals in the past century, to try to identify them as mainstream, out-of-the-box, or interdisciplinary. We show that the network clusters into scientific fields. The position of individual papers with respect to these clusters allows us to estimate their degree of mainstreamness or interdisciplinary. We show that over the past decades the fraction of mainstream papers increases, the fraction of out-of-the-box decreases, and the fraction of interdisciplinary papers remains constant. Studying the rewards of papers, we find that in terms of absolute citations, both, mainstream and interdisciplinary papers are rewarded. In the long run, mainstream papers perform less than interdisciplinary ones in terms of citation rates. We conclude that to avoid a trend towards mainstreamness a new incentive scheme is necessary.<br />12 pages, 9 figures
- Subjects :
- FOS: Computer and information sciences
Science and Technology Workforce
Economics
Entropy
Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Studies
Distance Measurement
Careers in Research
Mathematical and Statistical Techniques
Citation analysis
Reinforcement, Social
Number Theory
Cluster Analysis
Mainstream
Digital Libraries (cs.DL)
ComputingMilieux_MISCELLANEOUS
Measurement
Multidisciplinary
Careers
Physics
Statistics
Computer Science - Digital Libraries
Research Assessment
Bibliographic coupling
Professions
Incentive
Physical Sciences
Citation Analysis
Medicine
Thermodynamics
Regression Analysis
Engineering and Technology
Journal Impact Factor
Periodicals as Topic
Research Article
Employment
Physics - Physics and Society
Science Policy
Science
FOS: Physical sciences
Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
Bibliometrics
Research and Analysis Methods
Statistics - Applications
Physics [Science]
Humans
Applications (stat.AP)
Statistical Methods
Positive economics
Labor Economics
People and Places
Scientists
Population Groupings
K Means Clustering
Citation
Mathematics
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 19326203
- Volume :
- 15
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- PLOS ONE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....2a6643d15961e970062daa25680609ec