Looking across communicative genres: a call for inclusive indicators of interdisciplinarity

Disciplines vary in the types of communicative genres they use to disseminate knowledge and citing patterns used within these genres. However, citation analyses have predominately relied on the references and citations of one type of communicative genre. It is argued that this is particularly problematic for studies of interdisciplinarity, where analyses bias the disciplines that communicate using the genre under investigation. This may lead to inaccurate or incomplete results in terms of fully understanding the interrelationships between disciplines. This study analyzes a set of 15,870 references from 97 LIS dissertations, in order to demonstrate the difference in discipline and author rankings, based on the genre under investigation. This work encourages future work that takes into account multiple citing and cited works, especially where indicators of interdisciplinarity are used for the allocation of resources or ranking of scholars.