Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 24: Scientometric maps and dynamical models of scientific collaboration networks (accompanying symposium SYSM)

SOE 24.1: Talk

Thursday, March 10, 2016, 15:00–15:15, H36

Reclaiming the value of interdisciplinary research: a new index of scientific impact — •Elisa Omodei, Manlio De Domenico, and Alex Arenas — Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain

Defining an appropriate measure to assess the impact of scientific research represents a fundamental task of today's science of science. Nowadays most funding and hiring decisions are in fact based on quantitative indices of production. Several measures have been proposed, from citation count and the h-index, to more advanced graph-based metrics such as the science author rank algorithm. An important issue that has been mostly ignored by the previously proposed indices is the opportune ranking of scholars who work at the crossroad of different research areas and disciplines. Their scientific production is in fact very often underestimated because its impact cannot be assessed by considering only the specific discipline of the department of affiliation. Here we propose a method based on the analysis of bipartite interconnected multilayer networks of citations and disciplines, to assess scholars, institutions and countries interdisciplinary importance. Using data about physics publications and US patents, we compare the ranking obtained using our method to those obtained using other indices of scientific impact, and show that the scholars whose work has had fundamental implications in different areas are indeed found to gain importance when ranked according to our method.