Background
Multidisciplinarity is at the core of some of the most important scientific discoveries of the past 30 years. As a result, multidisciplinary PhD programs have sprung up claiming to be the most powerful training for doctoral students. Interestingly, however, multidisciplinary departments rarely hire graduates from such departments and rather employ faculty from traditional disciplines. In an effort to quantify the most multidisciplinary departments, we create a departmental co-authorship network using citation data from SCOPUS. Pinpointing those departments with the greatest contributions to multidisciplinary publications, we study their faculty to assess whether, indeed, multidisciplinary doctors are central to this intellectual shift. The significance here will be to provide some quantification of the value of a multidisciplinary PhD in the academic job market.
Questions
Which departments are the most central and influential in a departmental co-authorship network?
Future: What are the backgrounds and degrees of faculty in these departments?
Methods
Social Network Analysis of co-authorship network built with data from SCOPUS. Using their API, downloaded papers from “multidisciplinary” journals and constructed a departmental co-authorship network. In this network, departments were nodes and edges between them represent a paper in which they had collaborated. To accomplish this, I carried out a bi-partite projection of a graph with two types of nodes, papers and departments. I then analyzed this network to pinpoint the nodes of highest degree and centrality. I also analyzed other characteristics of the network such as its modularity.