A Proposal to Revise and Simplify the Disruption Indicator

Abstract

The disruption index (DI) based on bibliographic coupling and uncoupling between a document and its references, was first proposed by Funk & Owen-Smith (2017) for citation relations among patents and then adapted for scholarly papers by Wu et al. (2019). However, Wu & Wu (2019) showed that this indicator can be inconsistent. We propose a revised disruption index (DI*) which solves these issues and makes the indicator theoretically more robust and consistent. The sometimes small, but significant improvements are elaborated in simulations and empirically. The relation between “disruption” and bibliographic coupling is further specified.

Keywords: disruption, indicator, revision, bibliographic coupling