Identification of multidisciplinary research based upon dissimilarity analysis of journals included in reference lists of Wageningen University & Research articles

This paper discusses the identification of journal articles that probably report on multidisciplinary research. Identification of these articles may be important for strategic purposes for the institution where the research is performed or for the evaluation of researchers or groups. In order to identify possibly multidisciplinary research, this paper describes an analysis on the journals from which articles have been cited in the journal articles published by Wageningen University & Research (WUR) staff in 2006-2015. The journals with cited articles are inventoried from the reference lists of the WUR journal articles. For each WUR article a mean dissimilarity is calculated between the journal in which it has been published and the journals that contain the cited articles. Dissimilarities are derived from a large matrix with similarity values between journals, calculated from co-citations to these journals from the same WUR articles published in 2006-2015. For 21,191 WUR articles published in 2,535 journals mean dissimilarities have been calculated. For WUR articles with high mean dissimilarities this paper shows that they often are published in multidisciplinary journals. WUR articles with high mean dissimilarities also are found in non-multidisciplinary (research field specific) journals. For these articles (with high mean dissimilarities) this paper shows that citations are often made to more various research fields than for articles with lower mean dissimilarities. The mean dissimilarities, calculated per WUR article, also can be aggregated for the journals in which they have been published. This results in a listing of journals than can be ordered on the mean dissimilarity of the WUR articles that have been published in them. The analysis described in this paper shows that journals for which a high mean dissimilarity is calculated tend to have a multidisciplinary scope.