Measuring the disparity among scientific disciplines using Library of Congress Subject Headings

Examining the relationships among scientific disciplines is important today, but existing methods are limited by the contents and structure of their bibliographic databases. We therefore demonstrate a novel approach that measures disparity by examining the organization of published scientific books and monographs into Library of Congress Subject Headings. After outlining the method and analyses conducted, we compare our results with those produced by prior works, note potential implications of the demonstrated method for use by bibliometric practitioners, and suggest directions for further research.