Measuring the interdisciplinarity of Information and Library Science interactions using citation analysis and semantic analysis

Interdisciplinary interaction and integration have become major features of current science and technology development. Hence, ways to measure the strength of the interdisciplinary interactions between two given disciplines has become a crucial issue. In this study, we propose a novel framework for measuring interdisciplinary interaction that is based on both citation analysis and semantic analysis. Within the framework, direct citations combined with bibliographic coupling reflect citation relationship of interdisciplinary knowledge, while an LDA model combined with a word embedding model are used to explore the integration and diffusion of knowledge via semantic similarity. The strength of the interdisciplinary interactions is then assessed with an entropy weighting method. A case study on the interactions between Information & Library Science and six other disciplines demonstrates the efficacy and reliability of the framework.