Exploring and evaluating the index for interdisciplinary breakthrough innovation detection
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to establish a reliable index to identify interdisciplinary breakthrough innovation effectively. We constructed a new index, the DDiv index, for this purpose.
Design/methodology/approach
The DDiv index incorporates the degree of interdisciplinarity in the breakthrough index. To validate the index, a data set combining the publication records and citations of Nobel Prize laureates was divided into experimental and control groups. The validation methods included sensitivity analysis, correlation analysis and effectiveness analysis.
Findings
The sensitivity analysis demonstrated the DDiv index’s ability to differentiate interdisciplinary breakthrough papers from various categories of papers. This index not only retains the strengths of the existing index in identifying breakthrough innovation but also captures interdisciplinary characteristics. The correlation analysis revealed a significant correlation (correlation coefficient = 0.555) between the interdisciplinary attributes of scientific research and the occurrence of breakthrough innovation. The effectiveness analysis showed that the DDiv index reached the highest prediction accuracy of 0.8. Furthermore, the DDiv index outperforms the traditional DI index in terms of accuracy when it comes to identifying interdisciplinary breakthrough innovation.
Originality/value
This study proposed a practical and effective index that combines interdisciplinary and disruptive dimensions for detecting interdisciplinary breakthrough innovation. The identification and measurement of interdisciplinary breakthrough innovation play a crucial role in facilitating the integration of multidisciplinary knowledge, thereby accelerating the scientific breakthrough process.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The paper was initially presented at the first Workshop on “Innovation Measurement for Scientific Communication (IMSC) in the Era of Big Data” at 2023 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) (Wang et al., 2023d). The authors would like to thank Marie Bloechle at the University of North Texas for editing the language and writing of the paper. The authors are grateful to all the anonymous reviewers for their precious comments and suggestions.
Funding: The authors acknowledge the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant Number 22BT Q102) for financial support.
Citation
Wang, Z., Qiao, X., Chen, J., Li, L., Zhang, H., Ding, J. and Chen, H. (2024), "Exploring and evaluating the index for interdisciplinary breakthrough innovation detection", The Electronic Library, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-06-2023-0141
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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