Dimensions: Calculating Disruption Indices at Scale

Assessing the disruptive nature of a line of research is a new area of academic evaluation that moves beyond standard citation-based metrics by taking into account the broader citation context of publications or patents. The “CD index” and a number of related indicators have been proposed in order to characterise the disruptiveness of scientific publications or patents. This research area has generated a lot of attention in recent years, yet there is no general consensus on the significance and reliability of disruption indices. More experimentation and evaluation would be desirable, however it is hampered by the fact that the calculation of these indicators is time-consuming, especially if done at scale on large citation networks. We present a novel SQL-based method to calculate disruption indices for the Dimensions publications data on Google BigQuery. This reduces the computational time taken to produce such indices by an order of magnitude, as well as making available such functionalities within an online environment that requires no set-up efforts. We explain the novel algorithm and describe how its results align with preexisting implementations of disruption indicators. This method will enable researchers to develop, validate and improve disruption models more quickly and with more precision.