Abstract Collaboration across disciplines is a critical form of scientific collaboration to solve complex problems and make innovative contributions. This study focuses on the association between multidisciplinary collaboration measured by coauthorship in publications and the disruption of publications measured by the Disruption (D) index. We used authors' affiliations as a proxy of the disciplines to which they belong and categorized an article into multidisciplinary collaboration or monodisciplinary collaboration. The D index quantifies the extent to which a study disrupts its predecessors. We selected 13 journals that publish articles in six disciplines from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) database and then constructed regression models with fixed effects and estimated the relationship between the variables. The findings show that articles with monodisciplinary collaboration are more disruptive than those with multidisciplinary collaboration. Furthermore, we uncovered the mechanism of how monodisciplinary collaboration disrupts science more than multidisciplinary collaboration by exploring the references of the sampled publications.

Citations in scientific literature are important both for tracking the historical development of scientific ideas and for forecasting research trends. However, the diffusion mechanisms underlying the citation process remain poorly understood, despite the frequent and longstanding use of citation counts for assessment purposes within the scientific community. Here, we extend the study of citation dynamics to a more general diffusion process to understand how citation growth associates with different diffusion patterns. Using a classic diffusion model, we quantify and illustrate specific diffusion mechanisms which have been proven to exert a significant impact on the growth and decay of citation counts. Experiments reveal a positive relation between the “low p and low q” pattern and high scientific impact. A sharp citation peak produced by rapid change of citation counts, however, has a negative effect on future impact. In addition, we have suggested a simple indicator, saturation level, to roughly estimate an individual article's current stage in the life cycle and its potential to attract future attention. The proposed approach can also be extended to higher levels of aggregation (e.g., individual scientists, journals, institutions), providing further insights into the practice of scientific evaluation.

In this article we describe another problem with journal impact factors by showing that one journal's impact factor is dependent on other journals' publication delays. The proposed theoretical model predicts a monotonically decreasing function of the impact factor as a function of publication delay, on condition that the citation curve of the journal is monotone increasing during the publication window used in the calculation of the journal impact factor; otherwise, this function has a reversed U shape. Our findings based on simulations are verified by examining three journals in the information sciences: the Journal of Informetrics, Scientometrics, and the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology.

“Genius work,” proposed by Avramescu, refers to scientific articles whose citations grow exponentially in an extended period, for example, over 50 years. Such articles were defined as “sleeping beauties” by van Raan, who quantitatively studied the phenomenon of delayed recognition. However, the criteria adopted by van Raan at times are not applicable and may confer recognition prematurely. To revise such deficiencies, this paper proposes two new criteria, which are applicable (but not limited) to exponential citation curves. We searched for genius work among articles of Nobel Prize laureates during the period of 1901–2012 on the Web of Science, finding 25 articles of genius work out of 21,438 papers including 10 (by van Raan's criteria) sleeping beauties and 15 nonsleeping‐beauties. By our new criteria, two findings were obtained through empirical analysis: (a) the awakening periods for genius work depend on the increase rate b in the exponential function, and (b) lower b leads to a longer sleeping period.

Most measures of networks are based on the nodes, although links are also elementary units in networks and represent interesting social or physical connections. In this work we suggest an option for exploring networks, called the h‐strength, with explicit focus on links and their strengths. The h‐strength and its extensions can naturally simplify a complex network to a small and concise subnetwork (h‐subnet) but retains the most important links with its core structure. Its applications in 2 typical information networks, the paper cocitation network of a topic (the h‐index) and 5 scientific collaboration networks in the field of “water resources,” suggest that h‐strength and its extensions could be a useful choice for abstracting, simplifying, and visualizing a complex network. Moreover, we observe that the 2 informetric models, the Glänzel‐Schubert model and the Hirsch model, roughly hold in the context of the h‐strength for the collaboration networks.