The evolution of interdisciplinarity and internationalization in scientific journals

There is a widely held perception that science is becoming more international—through multi-national collaborations—and interdisciplinary, drawing on knowledge from multiple domains. However, these hypothesized trends have not yet been quantitatively characterized. With the publication metadata from OpenAlex, we examine trends in two groups of journals: disciplinary journals in natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences, and multidisciplinary journals that publish articles in multiple fields. Supporting existing perceptions, we find an almost universal trend towards increasing internationalization of both sets of journals. Nevertheless, we find disparities: medicine journals are less international than journals in other disciplines and do not increase their levels of internationalization, whereas physics journals appear to be segregating between those that are international and those that are not. We also find that multidisciplinary journals have undergone significant shifts in their disciplinary focuses over the past century, whereas disciplinary journals appear to have largely maintained their degree of interdisciplinarity.