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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Generic instruments in a synchrotron
radiation facility

a n o p e n a c c e s s

j o u r n a l

Kristofer Rolf Söderström1

, Fredrik Åström2

, and Olof Hallonsten3

1Lund University, Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, P.O. Box 192, 221 00 Lund, Sweden
2Lund University, Lund University Library, P.O. Box 3, 221 00 Lund, Sweden
3Lund University, Lund University School of Economics and Management, P.O. Box 7080, 220 07 Lund, Sweden

Keywords: Big Science, generic instruments, Herfindahl-Hirschman, multidisciplinary science,
Simpson, synchrotron radiation facilities

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the concept and the levels of genericity of different instruments, O
beamlines, at a synchrotron radiation facility. We use conceptual tools from the sociology of
science, bibliometrics and data from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF)
publication database, enriched by data from Web of Science. The sample size is of 11,218
observations for the period 1996 A 2018. The combined data set includes the beamline name,
available from the ESRF library database, which makes the instrument-level analysis possible.
We operationalize instrument genericity as the disciplinary diversity in the corpus related to
each instrument with a Herfindahl-based index theoretically supported by the concept of
generic instruments. Di conseguenza, we gain a quantitative insight into the generic character of the
instruments, as well as the way in which different scientific fields and the experimental use of
instruments group and align.

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INTRODUCTION

Synchrotron radiation facilities (SRFs) are large scientific facilities that use circular particle
accelerators to produce high-intensity X-rays for a wide array of experimental sciences,
including physics, chimica, biologia, and medicine, but also transdisciplinary fields such as
materials science and environmental sciences. Originally operating “parasitically” in particle
physics facilities, they are nowadays purpose built and outnumber accelerator facilities for
particle physics. They have also taken over significant shares of the expense accounts for
the construction and operation of Big Science in both national and international science
budgets (Hallonsten, 2016UN; Hallonsten & Heinze, 2015).

The essentially multidisciplinary character of these facilities makes them evade most classic
disciplinary categorization, and their primary role as user facilities—ordinary research groups
from universities, institutes, and industry seek access to these facilities in competition and use
them as part of their ordinary research projects—also makes their role in national and inter-
national science and innovation systems differ from traditional or common images of Big Sci-
ence. Synchrotron radiation facilities do not host large and mission-oriented programs of the
types found in for instance, the U.S. National Labs of the Cold War era, and they do not devote
their collected instrumentation to the search for subatomic particles, such as the Higgs boson
detected at CERN in 2013. Piuttosto, synchrotron radiation facilities provide experimental equip-
ment of several different types to scientists of many different fields, who apply for access in

Citation: Söderström, K. R., Åström, F.,
& Hallonsten, O. (2022). Generic
instruments in a synchrotron radiation
facility. Quantitative Science Studies,
3(2), 420–442. https://doi.org/10.1162
/qss_a_00190

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00190

Peer Review:
https://publons.com/publon/10.1162
/qss_a_00190

Received: 15 Dicembre 2020
Accepted: 4 April 2022

Corresponding Author:
Kristofer Rolf Söderström
kristofer.soderstrom@kultur.lu.se

Handling Editor:
Ludo Waltman

Copyright: © 2022 Kristofer Rolf
Söderström, Fredrik Åström, and Olof
Hallonsten. Published under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 Internazionale
(CC BY 4.0) licenza.

The MIT Press

Generic instruments in a synchrotron radiation facility

open competition and make temporary visits as users (Hallonsten, 2016UN, 2016B). A beamline
can refer to a physical space within the experimental hall, a dynamic meeting place where
multidisciplinary teams perform collaborative research (often with both local and visiting sci-
entists and staff ), and/or a set of equipment that brings the beam to the material being studied
(ESRF, 2017). The last definition is what enables the conceptualization of SRFs as hosts of
generic instruments (Shinn & Joerges, 2002). The beamline/instrument is what scientists use
for experimentation. Così, the focus shifts from the facility or the storage ring (Hallonsten &
Heinze, 2015; Rosenberg, 1992), to the beamline. As most synchrotron radiation facilities
operate several beamlines in parallel, their scientific use is multifaceted, changeable, E
dynamic.

From a bibliometrics perspective, the multidisciplinary nature of SRFs has presented some-
what of a problem, together with other issues such as the possibility to identify publications
based on data created at—but not involving authors affiliated with—the facility and they have
been studied to a lesser extent (Hallonsten, 2013). One of the few exceptions is Silva, Schulz,
and Noyons (2019), analyzing coauthorship networks and research impact at the Swiss Light
Source by making a distinction between publications from research teams either including
researchers affiliated with the facility or being exclusively made up of external researchers
(cioè., with no authors affiliated with the facility). To what extent this distinction is useful for
drawing conclusions on, for instance, the performance of the whole facility, or to what extent
it is at all meaningful to say anything about the facility as a whole from a bibliometrics view-
point, is something that can be a matter for debate. When analyzing SRFs, is making a distinc-
tion between internal and external publications enough for saying something about the facility?
Or should we venture into analyses of individual instruments instead? There have been previ-
ous attempts to direct research towards the instrument. A few examples include a study on scan-
ning tunneling microscopes as generic instruments (Mody, 2011) and the tendency to overlook
the role of instruments in treatments of scientific progress (Heinze, 2013).

The purpose of this article is to use bibliometric analysis to operationalize the genericity—
and levels—of the different instruments at a synchrotron radiation facility; that is—to what
extent we can use bibliometric methods to categorize an instrument according to the extent
to which its use is limited to specific use in one or a few research areas, or if it can be used for
various purposes in a number of research areas. This concept, which we argue is central for a
deeper understanding of how synchrotron radiation facilities are integrated into scientific com-
munities and how they are used, is defined in the following way. The instruments brandished
at synchrotron radiation facilities are different and used for a wide diversity of scientific exper-
iments. Inoltre, their breadth varies, and some instruments are highly specialized in both a
technical sense and with respect to scientific use, whereas others are adaptable and adjust-
able, and used for several different purposes. Making sense of the quality of genericity, how
it varies between instruments, and how this can be understood and defined, is the key purpose
of this article. We provide quantitative evidence not only that beamlines are generic instru-
ments but that there are differences between the instruments within the facility; and that it
is fruitful to do analysis on the instrument level when doing research on synchrotron radiation
facilities. To that end, the article uses some conceptual tools from the sociology of science,
bibliometrics and the rich data material of publications from a large synchrotron radiation
facility, to develop new and deeper insight into the multidisciplinary character of these facil-
ities and the way in which different scientific fields and experimental uses of instruments group
and align.

This article contributes to a shift towards quantitative analysis with theoretical frameworks
from the social sciences (Heinze & Jappe, 2020) to explore relationships between quantitative

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science studies and its neighboring fields (Leydesdorff, Ràfols, & Milojević, 2020), and to the
notion that scientometrics can benefit from theoretical foundations to explain and understand
its dynamics (Zhao, Du, & Wu, 2020).

The facility under study, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), located in
Grenoble, France and operated jointly by 13 European countries, was chosen for four com-
plementary and partly combined reasons. Primo, it is widely regarded as one of the world’s
leading synchrotron radiation facilities, leading in user friendliness, productivity, and technical
performance, and pioneering in all these regards since the start of user operation in 1994
(Cramer, 2017; Hallonsten, 2013). Secondo, and related, it is one of the world’s largest syn-
chrotron radiation facilities, with currently 44 independent instruments in operation and at
least 38 parallel instruments in operation since it was first fully built out in 1998–1999.
Third, since the facility opened for user operation in September of 1994 and was shut
down for a major upgrade in December of 2018, the study has a natural and rather long
time frame. Fourth, the documentation and empirical material available is formidable: IL
ESRF publication database contains over 36,000 entries, of which 11,218 were selected
as data for this study, and the facility has also been keeping open records of its technical
developments and user operation statistics in the shape of an annual report (ESRF Highlights),
published every year since 1994.

The article is structured as follows. In the next section, some fundamental facts about the
topic and case are presented on the basis of secondary sources. In the following section, UN
theoretical framework is outlined employing the concept generic instruments (Shinn & Joerges,
2002) and the development of a hypothesis concerning how scientific fields and subfields can
develop in directions of specialization and genericity. This framework is launched as a work-
ing model for understanding the distinction between the genericity of instruments and why
they develop in these ways. Then, in Sections 4 E 5, the data are introduced, and results
analyzed, followed by discussion and conclusions in Sections 6 E 7.

2. THE TOPIC AND THE CASE

The central technical infrastructure of a synchrotron radiation facility is the particle accelera-
tor, which is called a storage ring because it stores particles (electrons) in circulation for hours
or days and uses arrays of magnets to make the particles emit radiation to be used by scientists
at the experimental stations. These experimental stations or instruments are usually called
beamlines because they are connected to the storage ring through pipes that transport the
beam (Hallonsten, 2016UN: 240ff ). The instruments are technically specialized and vary a
lot, as does their area of use. In the early days of synchrotron radiation, in the 1960s and
1970S, instruments were developed and built by pioneering users who were predominantly
physicists and materials scientists, and it took until the 1990s before the wider potential of
synchrotron radiation for chemistry, biologia, medicine, paleontology, and so on began to
be realized. Technical developments as well as efforts to achieve user-friendly interfaces
and build up organizational arrangements to support comparably inexperienced users were
the main factors in this development (Hallonsten & Heinze, 2015). The ESRF was a leader
in a global effort of several facilities that took synchrotron radiation “from esoteric endeavor
to a mainstream activity” (Hallonsten, 2016UN, P. 83), and has, from the very start of its oper-
ation, had a large user community with a mix of different scientific fields represented, as seen
in Table 1.

The ESRF began as an ambitious idea within the European Science Foundation (ESF) In
the 1970s, and after several investigations and tiresome political/diplomatic work to bring

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Generic instruments in a synchrotron radiation facility

Tavolo 1.

ESRF user statistics, first and most recent full year of operation

Shifts
requested
1,265

Sept 1994–Dec 1995
Shifts
allocated
536

Application
rate (%)
9.6

Approval
rate (%)
42.4

Shifts
requested
5,020

2018 (calendar year)
Shifts
allocated
1,525

Application
rate (%)
14.6

Approval
rate (%)
30.4

Chemistry

Earth sciences

Environment

Hard condensed

5,315

40.5

1,997

37.6

matter

Cultural heritage

Life sciences

2,128

16.2

722

33.9

Medicine

Structural biology

Applied materials

science

Engineering

Methods and

instrumentation

986

Soft condensed

1,156

7.5

8.8

2,272

17.3

matter

Surfaces and
interfaces

Total

Percentage
change

430

43.6

416

659

13,122

4,760

36.27

2,608

981

8,450

240

1,782

1,076

3,147

7,065

455

3,082

34,331

2.62%

7.6

2.9

24.6

0.7

5.2

3.1

9.2

20.6

0.1

1.3

1,029

280

2,970

741

408

3,056

1,770

39.4

28.5

35.1

31.2

41.6

37.9

97.1

273

157

924

98.9

13,117

38.20%

2.75%

Fonte: ESRF Highlights (1994–1995, 2018). Note that categories have been altered over the years and that the different categorizations in 1994–95 and 2018
testify both to a broadening of the scope and simple recategorization. “Shifts” refers to 8-hour shifts at individual instruments.

the governments of European countries together and mobilize the funding for the project,
ground-breaking in Grenoble took place in 1988. Four years earlier, France and the Federal
Republic of Germany had agreed on the site and a basic funding solution (Cramer, 2017).
The ESRF was, right from the start, planned and designed to achieve a major leap in perfor-
mance and capacity, and thus to both increase the volume of synchrotron radiation available
to European users and enhance the quality of the experimental conditions for research with
synchrotron radiation. Competition was stiff from the start, with an oversubscription of
almost 3:1 (Vedi la tabella 1). Capacity has increased dramatically over the years; in 1994–
1995, 20 different instruments were in operation, compared with 44 In 2018. This is also
reflected in the statistics in Table 1, which also show a broadening of the scope of scientific
disciplines served at the facility level.

As large research organizations with costly infrastructure, synchrotron radiation facilities are
not spared from the current performance evaluation frenzy in science and innovation policy
(Hallonsten, 2016UN, P. 166ff ), but studies have quite convincingly shown that it is difficult,

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Generic instruments in a synchrotron radiation facility

to say the least, to assess their performance in any comprehensive and reliable way (Hallonsten,
2013, 2014, 2016B). This is most of all due to the nature of these facilities, namely that their
primary purpose is to serve external users who are employed by and do their work in other
organizations (università, institutes, firms), who apply for access in competition, and who
bring their own studies and research projects with them when making short visits to the labs.
In other words, to use a slight exaggeration, synchrotron radiation facilities “do not produce any
science themselves—their users do” (Hallonsten, 2016B, P. 486). While the internally
employed scientific staff certainly engage in experiments and end up as coauthors on many
of the publications emerging from synchrotron radiation facilities, the main mission and raison
d’être for facilities such as the ESRF is to provide the resources for experimental work. Perfor-
mance measurement is, nonetheless, a recurring theme. The ESRF is keen on pointing out its
high technical reliability—downtime is usually on the level of 1–2% and most scheduled shifts
are delivered to users. In these categories, the ESRF has had a globally leading position for most
of its lifetime. Allo stesso modo, when assessing oversubscription rates, which can be used as a proxy for
“popularity” within user communities, the ESRF stands out in comparison with its competitors;
also, when counting the total number of publications reporting on work done at the ESRF, IL
facility has an internationally leading position (Hallonsten, 2013). Tuttavia, it must be pointed
out that the latter two indicators—oversubscription rates and publication counts—can also be
seen as testimonies to the performance and capabilities of the ESRF user community and the
organizations to which they belong. Also, the most technically superior synchrotron radiation
facility will need competent and skilled users to do the actual science and produce actual
scientific results.

The ESRF was conceived, designed, planned, and organized to be a world-leading user
facility, catering to the needs of the multidisciplinary pan-European user community. IL
number of user visits reached 6,548 In 2018, which probably means that some 5,000–
6,000 individuals belong to the ESRF user community. Because instruments (beamlines)
are partly independent and several instruments are operated in parallel, the number of
independent instruments provided by the facility to the user community varies over time.
This makes the variation of scientific uses of synchrotron radiation facilities great, but it
also enables facilities to develop and construct new instruments and add these to their total
capacity, or substitute old ones, and thus adapt to changes in demand among users and to
scientific and technological developments. Depending on the exact count (sometimes
upgrades can be hard to distinguish from entirely new instruments), the ESRF has had
around 90 unique beamline codes in total over its 24 years of user operation, E 45
parallel beamlines in operation in 2018. The longest serving beamlines (seven in total)
have been in operation throughout the period studied (settembre 1994 to December
2018).

The ESRF serves users from a wide range of scientific fields, not seldom working in the
border areas between traditional disciplines and in heterogeneous teams that push the
boundaries of technology and science. This means that categorizations and taxonomies
are hard to apply in any stringent way; in information material and in organizational divisions
within the facility, labeling of scientific areas seems to be done pragmatically and with the
use of several categories that evade classic disciplinary groupings (Vedi la tabella 1) (Hallonsten,
2016UN, P. 111). È, clear though, that beamlines vary greatly in their breadth and thus in the
scope of experiments that they are designed to support. All are in some sense open ended, In
that they have been designed and built without a specific use in mind but rather as tools for
users to operate for the purposes of their experiments; however on this account, beamlines
also vary greatly.

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3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The theoretical starting point for the inquiry in this article is the identification of synchrotron
radiation facilities and the many different instruments they operate and provide to users as
generic instruments. This concept has roots way back in the study of science and was the topic
of a 1992 article by economic historian Nathan Rosenberg, who identified and conceptualized
generic technologies that are used for a wide range of purposes that were not anticipated
when they were designed—the microchip is the perhaps most pedagogical example, Ma
there are also several pieces of scientific instrumentation that certainly have this quality,
such as the electron microscope, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and particle accelera-
tori (Rosenberg, 1992, pag. 383–384). The latter is of course of specific interest here: Particle
accelerators were originally designed to enable the study of the inner structure of the atom,
and were used during the Second World War to produce nuclear material for the atomic bomb
(Hiltzik, 2015). After the war, particle accelerators returned largely to serving high-energy
physics and its search for smaller and smaller particles (including quarks), but as noted in
the previous section, since the 1970s they have also been transformed for use in synchrotron
radiation facilities that serve a wide and growing user community far beyond physics, E
whose use in science moreover is open ended, meaning they are generic at yet another level.

A comprehensive theory of generic instruments, and the actors and institutions that are
associated with them, was launched by Joerges and Shinn (2001). Their work emphasized that
generic instruments can be flexibly designed to be open ended in their use, but can also
become generic as users exploit their potential, and they can develop their generic capability
over time (Joerges & Shinn, 2001, P. 3). The continued work on generic instruments in STS has
remained in the qualitative realm and on the level of instruments that are comparably small
and not very complex or costly, or that develop in the direction of streamlining and dominant
designs that allow users off-the-shelf access. Using examples of this type, Heinze et al. (2013)
point the way to increased attention to instrumentation as a driving force for the renewal of
scientific fields, including the role of generic instrumentation in this regard. Hentschel (2015)
discusses how instruments develop genericity and uses historical examples, treating genericity
and nongenericity as binary and thus without accounting for different levels of genericity, let
alone how this can be measured. Lettkemann (2017) uses the highly interesting example of the
transmission electron microscope (TEM) to show how genericity can develop over time and
make instruments widely available, and eventually routinely used, in whole disciplinary fields.
Allo stesso modo, Gribbe and Hallonsten (2017) make an important case for the role of instrumenta-
zione (such as the TEM) in the growth of materials science in Sweden, which is an argument that
can be generalized to an international context and that invokes much of the conceptualization
of generic instruments by Joerges and Shinn (2001)—to a great degree, the genericity of instru-
mentation has driven the growth of materials science as an interdisciplinary field. The analysis,
Tuttavia, remains on the level of relatively small and not very complex instruments such as
the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and the atomic force microscope (AFM). In some
contrasto, Hallonsten and Heinze (2015) use the general framework of generic technologies for
their analysis of the emergence and maturation of the organizational field of synchrotron radi-
ation facilities in Europe and the United States and argue that the increasing genericity of both
facilities as wholes, and in individual beamlines, was crucial for the growth of these fields and
for the dramatic increase in the use of synchrotron radiation facilities worldwide in recent
decades. They thus point the way to a use of the framework of generic instruments in studies
of synchrotron radiation facilities and other contemporary and user-oriented Big Science, E
the refinement of the concept of genericity, for example by its operationalization in quantita-
tive studies of the use of particular instruments.

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A key question, not restricted to the study of the role of synchrotron radiation facilities in
science but relevant to the whole field of science studies, is how genericity can be understood
as a variable and studied comparatively and over time. If instruments develop genericity,
which is one of the basic postulations of Joerges and Shinn (2001) that several others have
confirmed and operationalized (see above), there ought to be different levels of genericity.
Synchrotron radiation facilities, which are both conceptualized as generic instruments as such
(the particle accelerator), and as hosts of several generic instruments operated in parallel and
catering to partly different disciplinary communities (the beamlines), should be a formidable
source of data to make comparisons over time and between instruments to develop refined
tools to study genericity and levels of genericity of instruments, and what this means.

4. DATA AND METHOD

The ESRF shut down for a 20-month upgrade period in December of 2018, which means that
no experiments were conducted thereafter. The analysis reported in this article is made with
the assumption that a significant enough proportion of the results of experiments conducted up
until the closedown in 2018 have been published, In 2019 E 2020, for the last years before
the shutdown to be analyzed together with previous years.

The ESRF publication data was extracted from the EPN-Campus: Joint ILL-ESRF Library
(n.d.). Three categories, employed at the library, were included on the analysis: Publications
with ESRF authors and describing an ESRF experiment, publications without ESRF authors and
describing an ESRF experiment, and publications with ESRF authors and not describing an
ESRF experiment. From this initial set of filters, all the publication metadata were downloaded
from the library. This resulted in an initial database of 36,004 publications. This initial selec-
tion included technical reports, PhD theses, prepublications, and books.

The ESRF annual reports over its years of operation were used to keep track of beamlines,
their changes, and their field of research. This information was cross validated with the original
database to inform and finalize the selection.

One challenging aspect in the data is to classify the beamlines for study. Left unprocessed,
beamline names result in 1,391 unique entries in the database. Several of these beamlines
have undergone upgrades, i cambiamenti, and replacements over time, which result in different
coding within the database. For the purposes of the study, only instances where a single
beamline was used for an experiment were included in the analysis. This disregards any
publication where more than one beamline was used and makes comparisons between
beamlines easier, as there is no readily available data or information regarding which parts
of the publication were made possible by which specific instrument.

A reclassification of beamline suffixes was performed. Beamlines that show a similar base
name are treated as the same. Two reasons have been identified regarding this code structure.
Primo, it could refer to a collection of instruments that belong to the same physical space.
Secondo, it can refer to upgrades, additions, or other alterations to an existing beamline1.

After data cleaning, which also included handling missing data and duplicates, the data-
base was matched with publication data from the Web of Science ( WoS) databases using dig-
ital object identifiers (DOI). Of the 18,943 publications that fulfilled the selection criteria and
remained after data cleaning, 13,503 were successfully matched to the WoS data. Although
this is a significant reduction in data, there is an added benefit of data structure and reliability

1 Per esempio, beamline codes ID14, ID14-1, ID14-2, and ID14-3 where recoded into ID14. ID15A and

ID15B are coded into ID15. Both are examples of beamlines in the same physical space.

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given by the WoS service, a familiar tool in bibliometric analysis. Finalmente, only journal articles
were included in the analysis. The final sample size corresponds to 11,218 publications for the
period 1995 A 2019. Tuttavia, not all beamlines used in the experiments were in operation
for the full period, and not all were in operation at the same time.

The data collected from the ESRF website records the beamline name used for the publi-
catione, a variable that enables analysis on the instrument level. Matching the publication data
from ESRF with WoS gives us a comprehensive and structured set of indicators that can be
used to deepen the analysis. The variables relevant for this study are the following:

1. Beamline(S): Name of the beamline(S) used for the publication.
2. SO (Publication Name): The journal name.
3. SC (Subject Category): WoS categorization scheme for journals.

The aim of our methodology is to identify potentially generic instruments from the body of
research associated with them. As one of the main aspects of generic instruments and tech-
nologies is their wide use and application (Joerges & Shinn, 2001; Rosenberg, 1992), a natural
step is to examine how diverse and concentrated are the disciplines associated to the instru-
menti. Infatti, the bibliometrics literature has addressed these exact questions from different
perspectives in studies of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Some measures of interdis-
ciplinarity, Per esempio, focus on the diversity of a body of research (Porter, Cohen et al., 2007;
Rafols & Meyer, 2010), of their references (Yegros-Yegros, Rafols, & D’Este, 2015), and citing
lavoro (Larivière & Gingras, 2010). Broadly speaking they can also be divided between
top-down approaches with predefined classification structures or bottom-up—document
based—measures (Moschini, Fenialdi et al., 2020).

Perhaps more similar to our approach are measures of interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity
(Moschini et al., 2020; Porter & Rafols, 2009), and patent generality for identifying general-
purpose technologies (Schultz & Joutz, 2010; Trajtenberg, Henderson, & Jaffe, 1997) dove il
focus lies on identifying so-called “market shares” or diversity/concentration of scientific disci-
plines for the former and patent classes for the latter. These are based on widely popular diversity
indexes in ecology and economics, notably the Simpson Index and Herfindahl-Hirsch Index (HHI)
(Herfindahl, 1950; Moschini et al., 2020; Rhoades, 1993; Rousseau, 2018; Simpson, 1949).

Continuing the rich literature of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary measures, our
method consists of analyzing the body of research proper, rather than their references or citing
lavoro. It is also a mixed approach where the journal names (SO) approach, arguably a bottom-
up approach, is compared and contrasted with the top-down classification structure provided
by subject categories (SC).

We argue that a generic instrument can be identified, at least partially, by these properties of
diversity and concentration of use across different disciplines. Così, an instrument is generic if
the body of research associated with that instrument is diverse and not concentrated in a small
range of disciplines. Similarly to Moschini et al. (2020) and Schultz and Joutz (2010), we
define HH(V ) as the complement of the Herfindahl-Hirschman index computed on a vector
V whose components represent N occurrences in the journal names or subject categories:

1 − HH Vð

Þ ¼ 1−

i¼1

s2
io

; si 2 V ;

(1)

where S measures the share of occurrences of every item i. In the bottom-up approach, based
on journal names (SO), i corresponds to the journal name. For the top-down approach, based

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Tavolo 2.

Index calculation by journal names: ID19

i = Journal
1

…

327

Sum

Nome

Acta Materialia

PLOS ONE

…

Stem Cells Translational Medicine

Occurrences
61

…

Share (%)

7.21

2.25

…

Share2
0.005

0.001

…

0.12

1.40E-06

846

100

0.012

Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

on subject categories (SC), i corresponds to the subject category. Tables 2 A 6 show an exam-
ple of the process for both approaches with data for beamline ID19. Tavolo 2 shows the process
with journal names.

The number of occurrences for each item i is calculated as a share of the total, che è
then squared as shown in the next column (Share2). The sum of this column returns HH(V ),
E 1 − HH(V ) returns the final value for the index: In Table 2, the values are 0.012 E
0.988 rispettivamente. The index ranges from 0 A 1. A higher value means lower concentration
and more diversity reflecting high multidisciplinary levels, which in turn identifies instru-
ments that are relatively more generic by their use, and vice versa.

Tables 3 A 5 show the process for the top-down approach, based on WoS Subject Catego-
ries. This approach needed extra data handling steps, as there is usually more than one subject
category per journal. We first transform the data to form a list of occurrences by the subject
categoria(S) based on journals.

Tavolo 3 shows the subject category for the sample of journals in beamline ID19. We can
take the first and most frequently occurring example, Acta Materialia, which has two catego-
ries based on the WoS classification: Materials Science, and Metallurgy & Metallurgical Engi-
neering. Tuttavia, Acta Materialia is not the only journal with that combination of subject
categories assigned to it. Infatti, eight additional journals also share this combination of cat-
egories: Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A—Physical Metallurgy and Materials Sci-
ence, Metals, International Journal of Refractory Metals & Hard Materials, Corrosion Science,
Materials Characterization, Materials Science and Technology, Metallurgical and Materials
Transactions B—Process Metallurgy and Materials Processing Science, and Metals and Mate-
rials International. These eight journals account for 81 scientific articles. Tuttavia, this com-
bination is not the only one in which Materials Science appears for this beamline. The subject

Tavolo 3.

Subject Categories by journal: ID19

Journal
Acta Materialia

PLOS One

…

Stem Cells Translational Medicine

Subject Categories
Materials Science | Metallurgy & Metallurgical Engineering

Scienza & Tecnologia – Other Topics

…

Cell Biology

Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

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Tavolo 4.

Subject category combinations: ID19

Subject Category combinations with SC: Materials Science
Materials Science | Metallurgy & Metallurgical Engineering

Materials Science

Scienza & Technology—Other Topics | Materials Science | Metallurgy & Metallurgical Engineering

Engineering | Materials Science

Materials Science | Physics

Materials Science | Mechanics

Materials Science | Mechanics| Physics

Crystallography Materials Science | Physics

Materials Science | Metallurgy & Metallurgical Engineering | Physics

Materials Science | Metallurgy & Metallurgical Engineering | Mineralogy | Mining & Mineral Processing

Chemistry | Crystallography | Materials Science

Chemistry | Materials Science

Chemistry | Scienza & Technology—Other Topics | Materials Science | Physics

Materials Science | Polymer Science

Electrochemistry | Materials Science

Chemistry | Electrochemistry | Energy & Fuels | Materials Science

Engineering | Materials Science | Mechanics

Materials Science | Microscopy

Materials Science | Mathematics | Mechanics | Imaging Science & Photographic Technology

Construction & Building Technology | Materials Science

Mechanics | Materials Science

Materials Science | Nuclear Science & Tecnologia

Materials Science | Mineralogy

Cell Biology | Engineering | Materials Science

Engineering | Mechanics | Materials Science

Engineering | Materials Science | Physics

Electrochemistry | Materials Science | Physics

Dentistry, Oral Surgery & Medicine | Materials Science

Construction & Building Technology | Engineering | Materials Science

Chemistry | Scienza & Technology—Other Topics | Materials Science

Scienza & Technology—Other Topics | Materials Science | Physics

Sum

Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

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311

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Tavolo 5.

Index calculation by subject categories: ID19

i = Subject Category
1

Nome

Materials Science

…

Sum

Metallurgy & Metallurgical Engineering

…

Archaeology

Occurrences
311

144

…

1,421

Share (%)
21.89

10.13

…

0.07

100

Share2
0.048

0.010

…

0.000

0.086

Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

Materials Science appears in 87 different journals in 37 unique combinations, which account
for 311 scientific articles. Tavolo 4 shows these combinations and the total occurrences in terms
of scientific articles, with a pipe separator. The total sum of 311 is the total number occur-
rences of the subject Materials Science for the beamline ID19.

Finalmente, Tavolo 5 shows a sample of the top and bottom subject category counts. As we have
presented earlier, the first one corresponds to the total occurrences of the subject category
Materials Science. The process is repeated for the totality of the unique subject categories
by beamline.

We can treat the output of Table 5 similarly to the output for journal names and calculate

the equation accordingly.

Top-down approaches, such as the use of WoS Subject Categories, have been criticized due
to the potential bias from predefined taxonomies or category structure ( Wagner et al., 2011).
Così, we will present the results from the calculation based on journal names and based on
subject category occurrences.

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5. RESULTS

The first part of the results section presents the output for the index calculations, with an anal-
ysis of the relationship of some key variables. A detailed breakdown for a selection of beam-
lines then follows that sheds some light into different levels of genericity and some differences
between the calculations by journal names and subject categories.

Tavolo 6 shows the main results for the study. It includes a list of the beamlines, the number
of years the beamline has been active at the facility, the number of publications associated
with said beamlines in the database, the number of unique journal names (SO), the number
of unique subject categories (SC), and the value of the index 1 − HH(V ) calculated from Eq. 1
for SO and SC, ordered by the results of the index by journal name. Tavolo 6 is divided into five
horizontal sections, which can be interpreted as the different multidisciplinary levels of the
beamline based on the journal name. When relevant, each beamline name will have a symbol
showing potential movements in the ranking when measuring with subject categories.

The top positions by journal name are taken by beamlines ID19, ID21, ID13, BM26, E
BM40. Inoltre, ID13 stays in the same position in the ranking no matter what measure-
ment we use. Beamlines ID19, ID21, ID13, and BM30 are also in the top five when measured
by subject categories. We see that if measured by the subject categories, BM26 drops one
place to the upper middle level while ID17 jumps to the top five (rising three levels). Allo stesso modo,
the bottom five beamlines in terms of the calculation by journal names are ID18, ID09, ID03,

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Tavolo 6.

Beamlines at the ESRF with instrument genericity levels

Years
active
20

Publications
846

Unique journal
names
327

Unique subject
categorie
65

Index journal
names
0.99

Index subject
categorie
0.91

235

385

803

540

371

453

987

249

372

274

1,107

376

140

172

2,013

258

273

217

122

210

383

176

132

123

153

209

164

128

137

206

107

122

170

120

185

0.98

0.97

0.96

0.95

0.94

0.92

0.88

0.80

0.94

0.90

0.84

0.89

0.84

0.79

0.82

0.85

0.84

0.82

0.85

0.86

0.79

0.76

0.79

0.89

0.80

0.81

0.78

0.81

0.75

0.40

0.63

Beamline
ID19

ID21

ID13*

BM26↓

BM30

ID11↓

BM02

BM01↓↓

BM25↓

BM08

BM23*

ID26

ID23

BM20↑

BM05↑

BM28↑

ID14↓

ID01

ID17↑↑↑

BM32

ID24↑

ID18*

ID09↑

ID03*

BM07

ID28

* Same position in ranking.

↓↑ Jumps in level when measuring by subject categories.

Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

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BM07, and ID28, of which all but ID09 retain their ranking when calculated by subject cat-
egory. ID18 and ID03 stay in the same ranking no matter which method is used. ID14 changes
places to the bottom five if measured by subject categories. The middle range appears to be
more sensitive to the measurement method. Only three of six beamlines stay in the same mid-
dle level when comparing the two measurements. The upper middle and lower middle ranges
show two of five beamlines staying at the same level. While individual results from the instru-
ments differ when different measures are used, their positions in the top and bottom end of the
range seem to show strong robustness.

The index is skewed towards the highly multidisciplinary range, which corresponds to

a priori expectations from the facility and the type of experimentation they make possible.

Figura 1 shows the correlation map between the calculated variables. We see no significant
linear correlation between the number of active years or the number of publications and the
index calculations by journal names and subject categories.

Figura 2 shows four scatterplots. Subgraphs A and B show scatterplots between the number
of active years on the y-axis and the indexes on the x-axis calculated by journal name and
subject categories, rispettivamente. Subgraphs C and D show the number of publications on
the y-axis. There is similar behavior between the indexes and no strong linear correlation
between them.

Figura 3 shows the scatterplots of the index calculated by journal names on the x-axis and
the index calculated by subject categories on the y-axis. Figure 3A shows the whole sample,
while Figure 3B zooms into the sample within the square in Figure 3A, without the two outliers
ID28 and BM7. The figures highlight some of the beamlines that suffer the most change in level

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Figura 1. Pearson correlation map, results table. Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data
from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

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Figura 2. Paired scatterplots. Index calculations, active years, and publications. Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the
ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

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when comparing the two measures. There is a strong but not perfect correlation between the
indexes.

The following breakdown tables show some examples of the calculations and will shed
some light on the comparison between an instrument or beamline with a high multidisci-
plinary or generic level and one with a lower level. Inoltre, it will help identify why
some beamlines show significant differences in levels when calculating with the different
variables. Each breakdown table contains the following columns. Rank identifies both the
item in terms of ranking and enumerates the unique items in each table. The next column
shows the name of the item. The Counts column gives the number of occurrences of each
item. Share represents the percentage share of each unique item in the table and is followed
by Share squared. Inoltre, due to space considerations, each table shows only the top
five and bottom five items.

ID19 is an example of a highly generic instrument (Tavolo 7). The elements that make it so
are the high number of 327 unique journals and the small percentage share of each journal
relative to the total number of publications. Per esempio, 61 del 846 publications belong to
the journal Acta Materialia, accounting for 7.21% of the share of total publications. PLOS ONE
accounts for 2.25% of the total publications, and so on. The top five journals in terms of pub-
lications account for around 16% of the total share of the 327 unique journal names that are

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Figura 3.
Scienza.

Scatterplot, SO-SC index comparison. Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of

associated with the beamline. The final column shows the squared values of the share for
every journal. The index is calculated by the sum of these values. So that HH(V ) = 0.012
E 1 − HH(V ) = 0.988 for beamline ID19.

The same procedure can be done for subject categories (Tavolo 8). For each journal, each
unique subject category is arranged in the occurrences list seen above. In questo caso, IL
top occurring category is Materials Science, with a share of 21.89%. There are 65 unique
subject categories, which appear 1,421 times in the 846 journals. In questo caso, the top five
journals account for 57% of the total share. The value for the index in this case is 1 − 0.086 =
0.914.

Tavolo 7.

ID19 Journal name breakdown

Journal name

Counts
61

Rank
1

323

324

325

326

327

Acta Materialia

PLOS ONE

Scripta Materialia

Materials Science and Engineering A—Structural Materials

Properties Microstructure and Processing

Scientific Reports

BMC Biology

Invertebrate Systematics

SPE Journal

Calcified Tissue International

Stem Cells Translational Medicine

Sum

Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

Quantitative Science Studies

Share (%)

7.21

2.25

2.01

0.12

846

100

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Share2
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0.001

0.000

0.012

434

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Tavolo 8.

ID19 Subject category breakdown

Rank
1

Subject category

Materials Science

Counts
311

Metallurgy & Metallurgical Engineering

Scienza & Tecnologia – Other Topics

Physics

Engineering

Mathematical & Computational Biology

Research & Experimental Medicine

Pediatrics

Arts & Humanities – Other Topics

Archaeology

Sum

Share (%)
21.89

10.13

8.52

8.44

8.30

0.07

144

121

120

118

Share2
0.048

0.010

0.007

0.000

0.086

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Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

ID19 is the top-ranking beamline in terms of genericity calculated by journal name. It drops
to second place when calculated by subject category, being replaced by ID21. This change
and what causes it is easier to highlight in the case of ID17, the beamline that changes the
most when comparing the two calculations.

ID17 is an interesting example due to the changes it suffers in position based on the method
for the index calculation. In the case of journal names (Tavolo 9), it is in the fourth level—of
five—in the results table, showing low levels of genericity relative to the other beamlines. It
ha 88 journals, with the most prominent one, Physics in Medicine and Biology, with a share
Di 15.38%, much more concentrated than ID19. The top five journals in terms of publica-
tions account for around 39% of the total share of the 88 unique journal names that are
associated with the beamline. The final column shows the squared values of the share for
every journal. The index is calculated by the sum of these values, so that HH(V ) = 0.048
E 1 − HH(V ) = 0.952 for beamline ID19.

In contrasto, the number of unique subject categories is much closer to ID19’s 65 unique
subjects (Tavolo 10). Inoltre, the share of the top five of 58% is also quite close to
ID19’s of 57%. It is no surprise then that they are more closely related when measured by
subject categories, sharing a spot on the top level in the results table. This could be explained
by the ratio of unique subject categories to unique journal names. For ID17, that ratio is
around 1: 2. For ID19, it is around 1: 5. This means that for ID17, there are about twice as many
journals as subject categories for those journals. For ID19, there are about five times as many
journals as subject categories.

ID28 is an example of an instrument with low generic or multidisciplinary level when
measured by journal name (Tavolo 11). It has 31 journals in its 132 publications. The most
prominent journal is Physical Review B, with a share of around 38%, with the top five journals
in terms of publications accounting for around 70% of the total share. The value of the index is
0.802, the lowest in terms of journal names.

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0.024

0.006

0.004

0.003

0.000

0.048

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Rank
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Physics in Medicine and Biology

Journal name

Counts
42

Share (%)
15.38

Tavolo 9.

ID17 Journal name breakdown

Medical Physics

Journal of Synchrotron Radiation

PLOS ONE

International Journal of Radiation Oncology Biology Physics

Papers in Palaeontology

Science Of Nature

Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica

European Journal of Anaesthesiology

Journal of Physics D–Applied Physics

7.69

6.59

5.13

0.37

Sum

273

100

Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

The calculation for ID28 by subject category (Tavolo 12) shows an even higher level of con-
centration. There are only 12 subject categories represented in the beamline, in which Physics
accounts for about 53% of the total share. The top five categories account for around 94% Di
the total. The value of the index is 0.63. Tuttavia, the lowest value in terms of subject cate-
gories belongs to beamline BM7.

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Tavolo 10.

ID17 Subject category breakdown

Rank
1

Subject category
Radiology, Nuclear Medicine & Medical Imaging

Counts
118

Share (%)
25.54

Share2
0.065

Scienza & Technology—Other Topics

Engineering

Physics

Optics

Veterinary Sciences

Cardiovascular System & Cardiology

Medical Informatics

Geology

Pharmacology & Pharmacy

10.61

0.011

10.39

0.011

6.28

5.84

0.22

0.004

0.003

0.000

Sum

462

100.00

0.105

Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

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Tavolo 11.

ID28 Journal name breakdown

Journal name

Physical Review B

Physical Review Letters

Journal of Physics—Condensed Matter

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Earth and Planetary Science Letters

EPL

Nature

Advanced Materials

Acta Materialia

Zeitschrift fur Kristallographie-Crystalline Materials

Rank
1

Counts
51

Share (%)
38.64

19.70

5.30

3.79

3.03

0.76

Sum

132

100

Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

Share2
0.149

0.039

0.003

0.001

0.000

0.198

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BM7 is another example of a low generic/multidisciplinary instrument. It has 13 unique
journals in 28 publications (Tavolo 13). Although it has a relatively low number of publications
compared with ID28, this does not affect the value of the index, as the relative concentration
of individual categories is an important factor for the calculation. The top journal is European

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Tavolo 12.

ID28 Subject category breakdown

Rank
1

Physics

Subject category

Counts
103

Materials Science

Scienza & Tecnologia – Other Topics

Geochemistry & Geophysics

Chemistry

Polymer Science

Crystallography

Spectroscopy

Metallurgy & Metallurgical Engineering

Instruments & Instrumentation

Share (%)
52.82

28.21

7.69

3.08

2.56

1.03

0.51

Sum

195

100

Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

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0.080

0.006

0.001

0.000

0.366

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Rank
1

Tavolo 13.

BM7 Journal name breakdown

Journal Name

European Physical Journal A

Physical Review C

Physical Review Letters

European Physical Journal C

Physics Of Atomic Nuclei

Radiation Physics and Chemistry

Physical Review D

Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A:

Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment

Physics Of Particles and Nuclei

Nuclear Physics A

Sum

Counts
6

Share (%)
20.69

17.24

6.90

3.45

100

Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

Rank
1

Tavolo 14.

BM7 Subject category breakdown

Subject Category

Physics

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Nuclear Science & Tecnologia

Chemistry

Instruments & Instrumentation

Sum

Counts
29

Share (%)
76.32

13.16

5.26

2.63

100

Fonte: Authors’ own elaboration based on data from the ESRF-Joint Library and Web of Science.

Share2
0.043

0.030

0.005

0.001

0.125

Share2
0.582

0.017

0.003

0.001

0.604

Physical Journal A, with a share of around 21%. The top five journals account for around 69%
of the total and an index value of 0.87.

Finalmente, Tavolo 14 shows a very high concentration of subject categories. Physics is shown
con un 76% share of the total, and the top five categories account for 100% of the total, con
an index value of 0.39.

6. DISCUSSION

By all accounts, the index returns relatively consistent results when measuring the multidisci-
plinarity of the body of research for a given instrument, revealing one dimension of the gen-
ericity of instruments. The most consistent results belong to the top and bottom ranges of the

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index, while the results in the middle range seem to vary slightly more. Tuttavia, the results
show a similar structure to the results between the calculations by journal names and by sub-
ject categories, although with slight differences in the ranking between the instruments, as we
can see in Table 3. The comparison between the two indexes shows advantages and disad-
vantages to both methods. It is possible to get a high degree of granularity when using journal
names, and the approach does not rely on predetermined and possibly fluid terminology of
services such as WoS. Tuttavia, the key assumption behind the calculation—that each journal
will constitute a different area or discipline—is at the very least debatable. One question that is
not addressed in the current study is to what extent journals (or their names) cover differences
in a field or subfield. The problem of aggregating to categories or fields could be addressed by
using the predetermined subject categorization of services such as WoS, giving some structure
to the data. Tuttavia, the approach is also not without its issues. One example is the com-
parison between beamlines ID28 and BM7. Both have their highest share of subject category
in Physics. Tuttavia, if one were to draw conclusions from only that piece of information,
one would incorrectly assume they belong to the same field, when in fact ID28 is more rep-
resented by condensed matter physics and materials science; while BM7 is represented by
astrophysics and nuclear physics.

Arguably, the main contribution is to show that it is worthwhile to do analysis at the instru-
ment level. There are varying levels of genericity between the instruments, whose difference
might be important to technicians, managers and/or policymakers. An instrument might be
designed to be open ended. Inoltre, technicians can upgrade the instruments to serve
new use cases and users can find new ways of using these instruments with varying degrees
of tweaks or improvements.

An instrument with generic qualities attracts many and different scientific disciplines to a
single instrument. Instruments are generic to the extent that they can be used and adapted
across communities for different types of experiments, and to different degrees.

The generic quality of SRFs is at least twofold. On the aggregate level, the technology
behind the storage ring has been called generic due to broadening applications from funda-
mental physics to multidisciplinary sciences over the years (Hallonsten & Heinze, 2015;
Rosenberg, 1992). Tuttavia, we argue that the individual instrument’s genericity is at least
as important conceptually. Rather than affirming that an instrument is also generic, we develop
a way to measure how generic it is and how it is different to other instruments in the facility.

This distinction gives way to interpretations of the role of different levels of genericity of
instruments in relation to disciplinary communities. Instruments that have been dominated
by publications in the Physical Review B journal and associated with more “narrow” physics
research areas have a lower genericity index in general. This should suggest that lower gen-
ericity of instrumentation serves research that stays within rather tight disciplinary boundaries.
Conversely, beamlines with higher levels of genericity seem to be more associated with
multidisciplinary fields such as Chemistry, Biology and Materials Science that are understood
as interdisciplinary or at least more broadly defined.

As outlined by Rosenberg (1992), one output or byproduct of research has been better
instrumentation with the ability to measure phenomena that it was previously not possible
to measure. The potential impact of these individual instruments on the sciences, society,
and the economy could be directly proportional to their level of genericity, as more
researchers from different disciplines find uses for the instruments. Qualitative research and
technical reports indicate that this has been the case, and the quantitative results of this study
show how these instruments and techniques have been used by different scientific disciplines.

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Tuttavia, we do not equate genericity with instrument success. As much as highly generic
instruments are needed, lower genericity should not be thought of as a drawback. Genericity
is most of all an indicator of disciplinary organization and potential cross-disciplinary
interaction.

When studying SRFs using bibliometric methods, the results here suggest the need to take
the different instruments—as well as the differences between the instruments—into account.
As shown, there is a difference not just in terms of different instruments being used in different
research areas but also in terms of to what extent individual instruments can be used in one or
several different research areas. Our approach provides an interesting path for measuring the
degree of variation of applicability in different research areas between instruments based on
the journals in which the articles are being published, as well as on the WoS subject areas
categorizing the journals.

7. CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER RESEARCH

The article explores how genericity, on the instrument level, can be related to multidiscipli-
narity, understood as a variable and studied comparatively. The focus on the instrument level
follows previous attempts to point out the importance of shifting the focus in the analysis of
science (Heinze, 2013; Mody, 2011). Our methodology operationalizes the conceptualization
of generic instruments applied to the instruments, or beamlines, of the European Synchrotron
Radiation Facility. We do this by employing a Herfindahl-based index of multidisciplinarity
with data from the ESRF library matched with WoS publication data.

We have not only shown quantitatively that the ESRF as a facility is generic and is a host to
generic instruments, but we have also shown how generic the instruments are. Our results find
that the genericity levels between the beamlines differ, and they are related to their disciplinary
inclination. The results are in line with the theoretical underpinnings, an important aspect for
new quantitative science studies.

Several aspects remain unanswered. Per esempio, why do some publications use more
than one beamline? Although these are a lower percentage of the sample, it would perhaps
be fruitful to consider the differences between the publications using one beamline against
publications using two or more beamlines. A follow-up question, when more than one beam-
line is used for the publication, would be to identify which beamline was used for which part
of the analysis, or experiment, in the publication to further identify how the instruments are
being used by scientists.

Another opportunity for further research would be the “life cycle” of the instruments. As
Rosenberg (1992) mentioned, new beamlines require time and effort to improve their perfor-
mance and eventually acquire a dynamic of their own. A common characteristic of new instru-
menti, according to Rosenberg (1992) is that their initial performance levels are poor and/or
unpredictable; they require components and materials not yet available; and they have unre-
alized potentials, apparent to some, as a result of bottlenecks. The need to improve the per-
formance of the instrument or to provide some ancillary technology results in intense research
that feeds back into the instrument and has the potential to lead to a great deal of new fun-
damental knowledge. A preliminary analysis of the results found a similar pattern over time.
Tuttavia, this study does not explore this dynamic.

Conceptually, the relation between the notions of genericity and impact could also be fruit-
ful to examine further, not least in relation to interdisciplinary research. The problem of eval-
uating research at this kind of facility based on publication and citation indicators is

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problematic (Hallonsten, 2013, 2014, 2016B); but operationalizing instrument genericity with
a multidisciplinary index has the potential of contextualizing relevant publication and citation
statistics for assessing the impact of the scientific research done at SRFs. Inoltre, IL
approach gives us important insights into the impact of interdisciplinary research, while over-
coming the usual difficulties of investigating its impact in bibliometrics; questo è, identifying
interdisciplinary research through the definition of a document set or a selection of journals
reflecting interdisciplinarity.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the anonymous referees who provided us with detailed and helpful
comments.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Kristofer Rolf Söderström: Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Visualization, Writing—
original draft, Writing—review and editing. Fredrik A˚ ström: Supervision, Writing—review and
editing. Olof Hallonsten: Conceptualization, Resources, Supervision, Writing—original draft.

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COMPETING INTERESTS

The authors have no competing interests.

FUNDING INFORMATION

The research behind this article was funded by the Swedish Research Council, grant no 2018-
01091.

DATA AVAILABILITY

The article uses proprietary data from Clarivate that cannot be made publicly available.

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