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Disruption indices and their calculation using web-of-science data: Indicators of historical developments or evolutionary dynamics?

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  • Leydesdorff, Loet
  • Bornmann, Lutz

Abstract

Science and technology develop not only along historical trajectories, but also as next-order regimes that periodically change the landscape. Regimes can incur on trajectories which are then disrupted. Using citations and references for the operationalization, we discuss and quantify both the recently proposed “disruption indicator” and the older indicator for “critical transitions” among reference lists as changes which may necessitate a rewriting of history. We elaborate this with three examples in order to provide a proof of concept. We shall show how the indicators can be calculated using Web-of-Science data. The routine is automated (available at < http://www.leydesdorff.net/software/di/index.htm >) so that it can be upscaled in future research. We suggest that “critical transitions” can be used to indicate disruption at the regime level, whereas disruption is developed at the trajectory level. Both conceptually and empirically, however, continuity is grasped more easily than disruption.

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  • Leydesdorff, Loet & Bornmann, Lutz, 2021. "Disruption indices and their calculation using web-of-science data: Indicators of historical developments or evolutionary dynamics?," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(4).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:infome:v:15:y:2021:i:4:s1751157721000900
    DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2021.101219
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    1. Zhang, Ming-Ze & Wang, Tang-Rong & Lyu, Peng-Hui & Chen, Qi-Mei & Li, Ze-Xia & Ngai, Eric W.T., 2024. "Impact of gender composition of academic teams on disruptive output," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2).
    2. Tong, Tong & Wang, Wanru & Ye, Fred Y., 2024. "A complement to the novel disruption indicator based on knowledge entities," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 18(2).
    3. Yiling Lin & Carl Benedikt Frey & Lingfei Wu, 2022. "Remote Collaboration Fuses Fewer Breakthrough Ideas," Papers 2206.01878, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2023.
    4. Yuyan Jiang & Xueli Liu, 2023. "A construction and empirical research of the journal disruption index based on open citation data," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(7), pages 3935-3958, July.

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