Effect of Scientific Collaboration on Interdisciplinarity in Climate Change From a Scientometric Perspective

• Published in: SAGE open Vol. 14; no. 2
• Main Authors: Qiu, Junping, Yu, Yunlong, Chen, Shiji, Zhao, Teng, Wang, Shanshan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.04.2024; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC; SAGE Publishing
• Subjects: Climate change; Interdisciplinary research; Statistical methods; bibliometric indicators; diversity measurement; interdisciplinary collaboration; interdisciplinarity; coauthorship
• ISSN: 2158-2440; 2158-2440
• DOI: 10.1177/21582440241241852

Insights into the interdisciplinary response to scientific collaboration remain scarce in interdisciplinary fields. The present work focuses on the effect of scientific collaboration on disciplinary diversity in the field of climate change using multiple statistical methods. The results show that research collaboration at the author and country/region levels has significantly positive effects on variety and DIV (an integrated diversity indicator), although these effects are limited. Additionally, the associations between the values of variety, disparity, and DIV and the number of departments are significantly positive, and similar results are found regarding relationships between these indicators and the number of countries/regions at the country/region and integrated levels. However, scientific collaboration has a negative effect on the balance of references at all levels. This study can improve our understanding of how scientific collaboration affects the multidimensional aspects of interdisciplinary research, and facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration in the future. Plain Language Summary This study focus on how scientific collaboration affects interdisciplinarity of cited references in the field of climate change. The combined methods (t test, Tukey’s post- hoc test, effect size, propensity score matching, and OLS regression analysis) were applied to reveal the effect of the levels and types of collaboration on interdisciplinarity. We found that research collaboration at the author and country/region levels significantly positive affected the disciplinary number of references and the integrated interdisciplinarity (named DIV), however, these effects were limited. Moreover, the more departments the coauthors came from, the more the interdisciplinarity was, but the less evenness the distribution of subject categories was. In addition, at author, institution and country/region levels, scientific collaboration has a negative effect on the balance of cited references. This study could provide valuable information to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration in climate change.