Authorship analysis of specialized vs diversified research output

Abstract

The present work investigates the relations between amplitude and type of collaboration (intramural, extramural domestic or international) and output of specialized versus diversified research. By specialized or diversified research, we mean within or beyond the author's dominant research topic. The field of observation is the scientific production over five years from about 23,500 academics. The analyses are conducted at the aggregate and disciplinary level. The results lead to the conclusion that in general, the output of diversified research is no more frequently the fruit of collaboration than is specialized research. At the level of the particular collaboration types, international collaborations weakly underlie the specialized kind of research output; on the contrary, extramural domestic and intramural collaborations are weakly associated with diversified research. While the weakness of association remains, exceptions are observed at the level of the individual disciplines.

The effect of multidisciplinary collaborations on research diversification

“…The current work inserts in the stream of studies concerning diversification versus specialization in the scientific activity of individual researchers. Previously, the authors searched for correlations between diversified/specialized research activity and the type of collaboration (intramural, domestic extramural, international) undertaken by individual academics, as observable through co-authorship of scientific publications (Abramo, D'Angelo, & Di Costa, 2017d). In this work the authors have instead examined the influence of the disciplinary composition of the research team on the diversified or specialized character of the participating academic's production.…”

“…At the same time, they verified the existence of gender differences in the propensity to diversification , as well as the effect of age and academic rank (Abramo, D'Angelo, & Di Costa, 2017c). Finally, they examined whether the type of collaboration chosen (international, domestic, intramural) has an influence on the researcher's propensity to diversification or specialization (Abramo, D'Angelo, & Di Costa, 2017d).…”

Public–private research collaborations: Longitudinal field‐level analysis of determinants, frequency, and impact

“…Academics who tend to diversify their research activities could have underlying characteristics of flexibility and curiosity for the unexplored, leading them to be more likely to engage beyond the academic sphere (Abramo, D'Angelo, & Di Costa, 2019).…”

Validity of machine learning in biology and medicine increased through collaborations across fields of expertise

“…In many fields of science, interdisciplinarity has become crucial to produce groundbreaking results through the integration of approaches from different disciplines 17,18 . Several recent studies 17,[19][20][21][22][23][24] have been investigating the role of interdisciplinarity by automatically extracting tens and hundreds of thousands of publications (e.g. from WoS 25 or PNAS).…”

“…Toward this end, one definition of interdisciplinarity is through the field of the journal in which they are published compared to the journal in which they are cited (the US NSF 26 classifies journals into 14 different disciplines and 143 subdisciplines 17,21 ; if published and cited in different fields or subfields, the article is deemed "interdisciplinary" 17,21,24 ). Other definitions 19,20 focus on the author's field and define interdisciplinary articles as work published by authors from different fields. So far this definition has been limited to Italian scientists for who there is a public directory mapping researcher and field 19,20 .…”