Analysing Institutions Interdisciplinarity by Extensive Use of Rao-Stirling Diversity Index

Lorenzo Cassi, Raphaël Champeimont, Wilfriedo Mescheba, Élisabeth de Turckheim, Pablo Dorta-González
2017 PLoS ONE  
This paper shows how the Rao-Stirling diversity index may be extensively used for positioning and comparing institutions interdisciplinary practices. Two decompositions of this index make it possible to explore different components of the diversity of the cited references in a corpus of publications. The paper aims at demonstrating how these bibliometric tools can be used for comparing institutions in a research field by highlighting collaboration orientations and institutions strategies. To
more » ... e the method available and easy to use for indicator users, this paper first recalls a previous result on the decomposition of the Rao-Stirling index into multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity components, then proposes a new decomposition to further explore the profile of research collaborations and finally presents an application to Neuroscience research in French universities. Fig 6. Comparison of category contributions for 8 universities. Red cells correspond to positive values of the centred contributions, while blue cells correspond to negative values. White cells correspond to contributions with p-values larger than 0.1. Categories are displayed only if the centred contribution is greater than 0.5 or smaller than -0.5 for at least one of the eight universities. Data in data_integer/stat_results files in https://github.com/turckheim/interdisciplinarity.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0170296 pmid:28114382 pmcid:PMC5256946 fatcat:vyyjrug6pzhr7mkx63tlzeyaya