Measuring interdisciplinary interactions using citation analysis and semantic analysis

Interdisciplinary interactions and integrations have become a major feature of the current development of science and technology. How to measure the strength of interdisciplinary interactions between two disciplines is a crucial issue. In our study, we propose a novel measurement framework based on both citation analytics and semantic analytics, which integrates three indicators - direct citation, bibliographic coupling and research content. Especially, LDA model is incorporated with a word embedding model to create a semantic solution that effectively constructing discipline-keyword vectors based on bibliometric data. At last, entropy method is applied with these three indicators to assess the interdisciplinary interactions strength. The interactions between information science & library science and other six subjects are analyzed as the case study to demonstrate the reliability of the methodology, with subsequent empirical validations.