The role of mainstreamness and interdisciplinarity for the relevance of scientific papers

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 15; no. 4; p. e0230325
• Main Authors: Thurner, Stefan, Liu, Wenyuan, Klimek, Peter, Cheong, Siew Ann
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 02.04.2020; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Applied physics; Bibliographic coupling; Bibliometrics; Citations; Clusters; Engineering and Technology; Evaluation; Innovations; Knowledge; People and Places; Physical Sciences; Physics research; R&D; Research & development; Research & development expenditures; Research and Analysis Methods; Science literature; Science Policy; Scientific papers; Scientists; Social Sciences; United States; United States > US; Austria; Singapore

Is it possible to tell how interdisciplinary and out-of-the-box scientific papers are, or which papers are mainstream? Here we use the bibliographic coupling network, derived from all physics papers that were published in the Physical Review journals in the past century, to try to identify them as m...