The evolution of interdisciplinarity and internationalization in scientific journals

Abstract

There is a widely-held perception that science is becoming increasingly international -- both in terms of collaborations involving authors from multiple countries and in terms of publications from authors from a broader group of countries -- and more interdisciplinary, i.e., drawing on knowledge and methods from multiple scholarship domains. However, these hypothesized trends have not yet been characterized quantitatively at the level of individual discipline. The widespread availability of scholarly metadata on scientific publications makes it possible to examine how science has evolved over time. Here, we use OpenAlex metadata to examine potential trends in two groups of peer-reviewed research journals: disciplinary journals in biology, chemistry, economics, medicine, physics, and political science, and multidisciplinary journals that publish articles from multiple fields. Supporting existing perceptions, we find an almost universal trend towards increasing internationalization of both sets of journals. Nevertheless, we find disparities: journals in medicine are less international than journals in other disciplines and are not increasing their levels of internationalization, whereas journals in physics appear to be segregating between those that are international and those that are not. We also find that multidisciplinary journals have undergone significant shifts in their disciplinary focuses over the past century, whereas disciplinary journals appear to have largely maintained their degree of interdisciplinarity.