Interdisciplinarity and collaboration: On the relationship between disciplinary diversity in the references and in the departmental affiliations

We proposed a novel conceptual framework to investigate two different aspects of interdisciplinarity in the process of knowledge integration: the subject categories referenced and the specialist disciplines of the authors' listed affiliations. Diversity was used to capture the disciplinary heterogeneity of our data sample in both respects. We presented an explorative methodology for retrieving feature words to classify the affiliates disciplines. Some interesting observations were drawn from this pilot study. 1) In general, there are positive relationships between interdisciplinarity and collaboration, but the specific nature of those relationships varies among different journals and according to different indicators. 2) Based on a schematic model of the discipline diversity in references versus the discipline diversity in affiliations, the combinations of low-low' and 'high-high' occur much more frequently than low-high' or 'high-low' in each of the journals under study.