Betweenness centrality as an indicator of the interdisciplinarity of scientific journals

Abstract In addition to science citation indicators of journals like impact and immediacy, social network analysis provides a set of centrality measures like degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality. These measures are first analyzed for the entire set of 7,379 journals included in the Journal Citation Reports of the Science Citation Index and the Social Sciences Citation Index 2004 (Thomson ISI, Philadelphia, PA), and then also in relation to local citation environments that can be considered as proxies of specialties and disciplines. Betweenness centrality is shown to be an indicator of the interdisciplinarity of journals, but only in local citation environments and after normalization; otherwise, the influence of degree centrality (size) overshadows the betweenness‐centrality measure. The indicator is applied to a variety of citation environments, including policy‐relevant ones like biotechnology and nanotechnology. The values of the indicator remain sensitive to the delineations of the set because of the indicator's local character. Maps showing interdisciplinarity of journals in terms of betweenness centrality can be drawn using information about journal citation environments, which is available online.