Interdisciplinarity is essential for addressing complex scientific problems that transcend disciplinary boundaries. Geology leverages methods from diverse domains to drive research innovation. However, quantitative evaluations of interdisciplinary connections between geology and other domains are lacking. Therefore, this study employed bibliometrics and natural language processing to assess the interdisciplinary trajectory of geology by analyzing temporal patterns in citation flows. First, a data set of geology-related publications and their cited references was collected from the Scopus database. Then, a semantic text classification approach, integrating sentence transformers and cosine similarity, was implemented to categorize cited references into eight scientific domains: mathematical and physical science, chemical science, life science, engineering and materials science, earth science, information science, management science, and health science. Longitudinal analysis of the distribution of references across these domains reveals trends in interdisciplinary collaboration over time. Finally, N-gram frequency analysis was performed on reference data associated with high-growth domains to identify specific influential techniques bridging disciplines. The results demonstrate a pronounced increase in interdisciplinarity between geology and information science, especially in applications of artificial intelligence, since 2016, with an average interdisciplinary potential of 0.1484. Key techniques driving this integration include artificial neural networks, logistic regression, support vector machines, etc. Additionally, the eight domains were expanded into 126 sub-disciplines to enable more detailed interdisciplinary analysis. Furthermore, three large language models were employed to verify the reliability of the adopted semantic analysis. The results suggest that our methodology provides robust approaches for quantifying interdisciplinary dynamics and is generalizable to other interdisciplinary fields.
{"title":"Measuring Interdisciplinarity in Geology: A Semantic Analysis Approach","authors":"Pengfei Li, Yuqing Wang, Na Xu","doi":"10.1029/2025EA004494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EA004494","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Interdisciplinarity is essential for addressing complex scientific problems that transcend disciplinary boundaries. Geology leverages methods from diverse domains to drive research innovation. However, quantitative evaluations of interdisciplinary connections between geology and other domains are lacking. Therefore, this study employed bibliometrics and natural language processing to assess the interdisciplinary trajectory of geology by analyzing temporal patterns in citation flows. First, a data set of geology-related publications and their cited references was collected from the Scopus database. Then, a semantic text classification approach, integrating sentence transformers and cosine similarity, was implemented to categorize cited references into eight scientific domains: mathematical and physical science, chemical science, life science, engineering and materials science, earth science, information science, management science, and health science. Longitudinal analysis of the distribution of references across these domains reveals trends in interdisciplinary collaboration over time. Finally, N-gram frequency analysis was performed on reference data associated with high-growth domains to identify specific influential techniques bridging disciplines. The results demonstrate a pronounced increase in interdisciplinarity between geology and information science, especially in applications of artificial intelligence, since 2016, with an average interdisciplinary potential of 0.1484. Key techniques driving this integration include artificial neural networks, logistic regression, support vector machines, etc. Additionally, the eight domains were expanded into 126 sub-disciplines to enable more detailed interdisciplinary analysis. Furthermore, three large language models were employed to verify the reliability of the adopted semantic analysis. The results suggest that our methodology provides robust approaches for quantifying interdisciplinary dynamics and is generalizable to other interdisciplinary fields.</p>","PeriodicalId":54286,"journal":{"name":"Earth and Space Science","volume":"12 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2025EA004494","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145580943","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Babatunde O. Adebesin, Akeem B. Rabiu, Bolarinwa J. Adekoya, Elijah O. Falayi, Shola J. Adebiyi, Stephen O. Ikubanni, Tomiwa Akinyemi, Racheal F. Oloruntola, Mathew A. Duhunpar, Ayooluwa Aregbesola
Content assessment of research metrics plays a pivotal role in the evaluation of scientific productivity globally, especially in a selected field and region. Data from 28 Space-Science Journals spanning 2014–2023, from the Scopus-database, based on African publication output, citations, views-counts, and Field-Weighted-Citation-Impact (Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI)) metrics were used. The results revealed that Africa contributes only 3.2% of the world publication volume in Space Science. From the African output, South-Africa leads with 40.9%, followed by Nigeria (14.3%) and Egypt (13.6%). These three countries contribute ≈70% of the African publication volume. For the citation metrics, Africa contributed 5.0% of the world volume. Publication in Journal of Advances in Space Research is more sought after by African Authors, while Astrophysics and Space Science journal recorded the highest African-to-world publication output percentage (11.3%). African authors show a preference for publishing in Journals with high percentile score and citation rates. Citation-wise, South-Africa accounted for 64% of the total volume from Africa. Only seven countries present citation metrics above 1% of the total volume. South Africa (46%), Morocco (10%), Egypt (9%), Namibia (7%), and Nigeria (7%) are the five countries with publication View counts of above 4,000. Only Ethiopia and South-Africa had FWCI above the world average, with values of 1.47 and 1.25 respectively. North Africa region dominated the appearance list of the 10 top countries in publication, citation, counts views and FWCI while Southern Africa leads in volume. The work further situates the uniqueness/global acceptance of the Scopus and Web-of-Science databases as tools for research publication assessment.
{"title":"Space Science Research in Africa: Publication Trends, Citation Analysis, and Collaborative Patterns","authors":"Babatunde O. Adebesin, Akeem B. Rabiu, Bolarinwa J. Adekoya, Elijah O. Falayi, Shola J. Adebiyi, Stephen O. Ikubanni, Tomiwa Akinyemi, Racheal F. Oloruntola, Mathew A. Duhunpar, Ayooluwa Aregbesola","doi":"10.1029/2025EA004254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EA004254","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Content assessment of research metrics plays a pivotal role in the evaluation of scientific productivity globally, especially in a selected field and region. Data from 28 Space-Science Journals spanning 2014–2023, from the Scopus-database, based on African publication output, citations, views-counts, and Field-Weighted-Citation-Impact (Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI)) metrics were used. The results revealed that Africa contributes only 3.2% of the world publication volume in Space Science. From the African output, South-Africa leads with 40.9%, followed by Nigeria (14.3%) and Egypt (13.6%). These three countries contribute ≈70% of the African publication volume. For the citation metrics, Africa contributed 5.0% of the world volume. Publication in Journal of Advances in Space Research is more sought after by African Authors, while Astrophysics and Space Science journal recorded the highest African-to-world publication output percentage (11.3%). African authors show a preference for publishing in Journals with high percentile score and citation rates. Citation-wise, South-Africa accounted for 64% of the total volume from Africa. Only seven countries present citation metrics above 1% of the total volume. South Africa (46%), Morocco (10%), Egypt (9%), Namibia (7%), and Nigeria (7%) are the five countries with publication View counts of above 4,000. Only Ethiopia and South-Africa had FWCI above the world average, with values of 1.47 and 1.25 respectively. North Africa region dominated the appearance list of the 10 top countries in publication, citation, counts views and FWCI while Southern Africa leads in volume. The work further situates the uniqueness/global acceptance of the Scopus and Web-of-Science databases as tools for research publication assessment.</p>","PeriodicalId":54286,"journal":{"name":"Earth and Space Science","volume":"12 11","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2025EA004254","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145521929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"地球科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mao Zhang, Gaopeng Lu, Ziyi Wang, Zhengwei Cheng, Steven A. Cummer, Yazhou Chen
Tweek atmospherics are ELF/VLF pulse signals with frequency dispersion characteristics that originate from lightning discharges. Previous research has employed tweek atmospherics to examine long-term trends in the lower ionosphere; however, their utility in capturing diurnal-scale variations has been largely unexplored. Based on the machine learning method, we statistically study a massive data set of 48,395 first-order tweeks and obtain the diurnal variations of the nighttime lower ionosphere with a time resolution of 15 min. The variation amplitude of the mean reflection height (