Mapping the Interdisciplinarity in Scientometric Studies

Abstract

The scope of scientometric studies has been increased in recent years. Most of previous studies in this field are just like executive reports, and the international scholars have expressed their concerns about this problem. The nature of scientometric studies has not been studied in previous researches and we do not know that scientometric studies are categorized in multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary domain. This paper explored the use of scientometric approach to study the scientometrics domain. We responsed to these questions: 1) Is the scientometric studies classified in interdisciplinary domain? 2) What is the contribution of different scientific fields to scientometric studies? 3) What is the current direction of scientometric studies? The data was extracted from Web of Science (WoS). The results showed that scientometric studies were a part of interdisciplinary studies. Furthermore, the library and information science and computer science had major contribution to this field.

Keywords

• scientometrics
• interdisciplinarity
• interdisciplinary
• cross-disciplinarity disciplinarity
• meta-analysis
• Web of Science