Interdisciplinarity of scientific fields and its evolution based on graph of project collaboration and co-authoring

The paper investigates interdisciplinarity of scientific fields based on graph of collaboration between the researchers. A new measure for interdisciplinarity is proposed that takes into account graph content and structure. Similarity between science categories is estimated based on text similarity between their descriptions. The proposed new measure is applied in exploratory analysis of research community in Slovenia. We found that Biotechnology and Natural sciences are the most interdisciplinary in their publications and collaborations on research projects. In addition evolution of interdisciplinarity of scientific fields in Slovenia is observed, showing that over the last decade interdisciplinarity increases the fastest in Medical sciences mainly due to collaborations with Natural and Technical sciences.