Does prestige dimension influence the interdisciplinary performance of scientific entities in knowledge flow? Evidence from the e-government field

Shunshun Shi, Wenyu Zhang, Shuai Zhang, Jie Chen

Abstract: It has long been understood that knowledge flow can be divided into knowledge integration and knowledge diffusion and can be investigated by interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR) approaches. The literature describes some quantitative approaches for measuring interdisciplinary research, and all of them belong to a popularity dimension. Previous work failed to address the problem of evaluating interdisciplinary research in a prestige dimension. However, in this study, the authors introduce an extended IDR measure that combines the P-Rank algorithm with the traditional IDR approaches to promote the current IDR approaches from the popularity dimension to the prestige dimension. This extended measure explores the prestige dimension of papers and considers the subsequent contribution of papers of different prestige devoted to the knowledge flow in which they are embedded. An experiment regarding the e-government field demonstrates that the interdisciplinary performance of some papers is overestimated under traditional IDR approaches and that the performance would be more reasonable under an extended IDR measure that considers the prestige dimension. We expect that the extended IDR measure can identify the different contributions of papers of different prestige with regard to their interdisciplinary performance and then reevaluate their contributions to the knowledge flow in which they are embedded.