Classifying Research Articles in Multidisciplinary Sciences Journals into Subject Categories

In the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database, the subject categories of a journal are applied to all articles in the journal. However, many articles in multidisciplinary Sciences journals may only be represented by a small number of subject categories. To provide more accurate information on the research areas of articles in such journals, we can classify articles in these journals into subject categories as defined by Web of Science based on their references. For an article in a multi-disciplinary sciences journal, the method counts the subject categories in all of the article's references indexed by Web of Science, and uses the most numerous subject categories of the references to determine the most appropriate classification of the article. We used articles in an issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) to validate the correctness of the method by comparing the obtained results with the categories of the articles as defined by PNAS and their content. This study shows that the method provides more precise search results for the subject category of interest in bibliometric investigations through recognition of articles in multidisciplinary sciences journals whose work relates to a particular subject category.