Discovering Interdisciplinarily Spread Knowledge in the Academic Literature

Abstract

With the increase in scientific publications and the diversification of research areas, science has become complex and interdisciplinary. Discovering important knowledge has become difficult even for researchers in specific domains. Previously proposed keyphrase extraction methods focus mainly on detecting intensively discussed topics in specific domains but do not distinguish concepts with the interdisciplinary spread from those discussed in narrow areas. Here, we propose a diffusion meme score that evaluates the knowledge diffusion distance in a paper citation network. The distance between papers that contain specific terms is measured by the network embedding space of the citation network. Using 57 million publication records from 48 years of Scopus, we evaluated newly appearing terms in and after 1975 in biomedical science papers using the proposed indicator. Approximately half of the top 20 terms were related to Nobel Prize or Clarivate Citation Laureates, and the top terms of the indicators were more likely to appear in Wikipedia than terms extracted using existing methods. Moreover, the top terms were unlikely to include specific minor diseases, which are often extracted using existing methods. Therefore, the diffusion meme score evaluates important terms from scientific literature and citation networks that are more interdisciplinary. Our method improves the understanding of young researchers regarding domains, the development of the history of science, and the evaluation of researcher contributions.