Abstract: Under the background of global knowledge economy, the depth and breadth of interdisciplinary research activity has become an essential factor in the innovation process, which generates an important impact on the macro-economy development and academic growth. In the paper, we firstly review the existing interdisciplinary measurement research at home and abroad. Based on the Web of Science Classification of Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) provided by ISI Thomson Reuters, we propose the Specialization Index, Integration Index and Diffusion Index to measure the inter-disciplinarity of certain research, and a science mapping visualization method to present the distribution characteristics of interdisciplinary research. Finally, taking the publications of Nobel Prize winners in Physics from 2005 to 2014 as examples, we carry out the empirical research on the established index to figure out the interdisciplinary research characteristic of these well-known scholars. The results indicate that the innovative achievements of physics have obvious subject characteristics; the research publication of the Nobel Prize winner generally focuses on the physical science field; both integration degree and diffusion degree are still in a lower level.

Key words: interdisciplinary, scientometrics;web of science classification, Nobel Prize