Does diversity of papers affect their citations? Evidence from American Physical Society Journals

摘要

In this work, we study the correlation between interdisciplinarity of paperswithin physical sciences and their citations by using meta data of articlespublished in American Physical Society's Physical Review journals between 1985to 2012. We use the Weitzman diversity index to measure the diversity of papersand authors, exploiting the hierarchical structure of PACS (Physics andAstronomy Classification Scheme) codes. We find that the fraction of authorswith high diversity is increasing with time, where as the fraction of leastdiversity are decreasing, and moderate diversity authors have higher tendencyto switch over to other diversity groups. The diversity index of papers iscorrelated with the citations they received in a given time period from theirpublication year. Papers with lower and higher end of diversity index receivelesser citations than the moderate diversity papers.