Comparison of Interdisciplinarity among Domains: From the Viewpoint of the Diversity of Researchers’ Fields of Specialization

Abstract

We analyze the interdisciplinarity of domains from the two points of view focusing on the diversity of researchers’ fields of specialization: (1) the variety of researchers’ fields of specialization and (2) the dispersion of the number of researchers among fields of specialization. The target domains, which we compare in this study, are informatics, environmental science, mathematics, biomedical engineering, history, and management studies. As for (1), we investigate the number of different fields of specialization for not only the targeted domain as a whole but also each researcher and article. As for (2), we evaluate balance in the dispersion with Simpson’s D and Shannon’s H’. The results of comparison depend on indices and aggregation levels.