Abstract:

Interdisciplinary research has been practiced and studied so extensively that its measurement becomes priority in the field of Bibliometrics. Concepts concerning the measurement of interdisciplinary research are confusing in previous publications. First of all, this paper redefines ‘Interdisciplinarity’, and constructs a conceptual framework in order to interpret how its measurement has been conducted. Then, it conducts an empirical study to measure 101 well-established scholars over the world, and demonstrates that the more extensively a scholar cites, the higher his impact is. In addition, it also reveals that the interdisciplinarity of bibliometircs scholars is significantly higher than that of information management scholars.

Key words: Interdisciplinarity, Interdisciplinary research, Interdisciplinary publications, Interdisciplinary citations, Indicators for measurement