IS THE DIVERSITY INDEX USEFUL TO IDENTIFY THE DIVERSE OR INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH ACTIVITY? APPLYING THE DIVERSITY INDEX TO KOREAN GOVERNMENT BASIC RESEARCH PROGRAM

Nowadays society wants that basic research plays more active role in economic development, social problem solving and so on. So most governments in the world try to focus more on practical policy like commercialization and linkage to startup of university research. However, the fundamental objectives of basic research are expanding knowledge frontier and raising up research human resource. This requires more useful and practical index to guide the appropriate investments to funding agencies.

This article focuses on applying diversity index to government individual basic research. Korean government has three programs by researcher’s career level that are youth researcher, middle-level researcher and advanced-level researcher program.

Youth researcher program focuses more on offering the research chances, But advanced-level researcher program focuses more on increasing research excellence.

In the long run national research capability is based on the diverse activity and high quality of research and researchers. Diversity index can be used to measure both the diverse activity and quality of research(accurately interdisciplinary research).

This article identifies the diversity index usefulness in Korean government basic research program. At first, It is about the diversity index indicating the diverse research activity. So the author assumes that the diversity index of youth researcher program is the highest in three programs.
Secondly, It is about the index indicating the interdisciplinary research activity. So the author assumes that the diversity index of advanced-level researcher program is the highest in three programs.

Simpson index and sterling index are used to measure diversity. Diversity concept consists of three characteristics. They are variety, balance and disparity. Sterling index is the combination of all three characteristics. However, Simpson index is the combination of two characteristics except for disparity.

To induce diversity index, 4 year SCI paper data were used from 2007 to 2010. Those SCI papers were outputs of three programs. Total number of SCI papers are 12,068. While for diverse research activity the information of science fields that papers belonged to is used, for interdisciplinary research activity the information of science fields that the references of papers belonged to is used.

For diverse research activity the simpson index is the highest in Youth researcher program. Otherwise, the sterling index is the highest in Advanced-level researcher program. This means that the assumption is true for simpson index, but not true for sterling index. In sterling index the effect of distance among science fields outweighed the effect of the number or proportion of science fields. This also implicates that Youth researcher program studied in more science fields more equally than Advanced-level research program, but didn't do on more dissimilar science fields. In funding policy this shows Youth researcher program needs to widen the scope of science fields compared with Advanced-level researcher program.

For interdisciplinary research activity the simpson index is the highest in Youth researcher program. On the other hand, the sterling index is the highest in Advanced-level researcher program. This means that the assumption is true for sterling index, but not true for simpson index. This shows that Advanced-level researcher program research is more active in unifying or expanding different fields.