Some call it in discipline of information science, some under the umbrella of science of science, Some call it in discipline of sociology of science, and some call it an independent field, and some consider it an interdisciplinary, and so on. What do you think?
I'd say that it resides somewhere in the applied statistics branch - aided by numerical analysis tools. But it also depends on the goal, I guess. If you are looking for citation patterns you might use tools from applied math to form networks of citations, or distances between sciences/scientists. I have done a bit of that, for fun, but I would guess that it is also interesting to use network tools also to learn whether there are isolated islands among papers.
One thing that I did was based on the hunch that a theme in applied math had two isolated islands of citations among themselves, that is, no connection among them. (And yet the two fields even had the same name!) A tool based on citation patterns in journal papers confirmed that even though the field(s) had the same name, and the core "problem" also was identical, there were NO citation patterns reaching from one side to the other - so they were essentially building two isolated islands. I found that astonishing - that they did never meet!
I tend to think of as just part of the individual science they are attempting to measure. Thus it is closer to transdisciplinary than interdisciplinary or separate. It has historically just been its own field though, which I think is deeply problematic.
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