Interdisciplinarity and insularity in the diffusion of knowledge: an analysis of disciplinary boundaries between philosophy of science and the sciences

Two fundamentally different perspectives on knowledge diffusion dominate debates about academic disciplines. On the one hand, critics of disciplinary research and education have argued that disciplines are isolated silos, within which specialists pursue inward-looking and increasingly narrow research agendas. On the other hand, critics of the silo argument have demonstrated that researchers constantly import and export ideas across disciplinary boundaries. These perspectives have different implications for how knowledge diffuses, how intellectuals gain and lose status within their disciplines, and how intellectual reputations evolve within and across disciplines. We argue that highly general claims about the nature of disciplinary boundaries are counterproductive, and that research on the nature of specific disciplinary boundaries is more useful. To that end, this paper uses a novel publication and citation network dataset and statistical models of citation networks to test hypotheses about the boundaries between philosophy of science and 11 disciplinary clusters. Specifically, we test hypotheses about whether engaging with and being cited by scientific communities outside philosophy of science has an impact on one’s position within philosophy of science. Our results suggest that philosophers of science produce interdisciplinary scholarship, but they tend not to cite work by other philosophers when it is published in journals outside of their discipline. Furthermore, net of other factors, receiving citations from other disciplines has no meaningful impact—positive or negative—on citations within philosophy of science. We conclude by considering this evidence for simultaneous interdisciplinarity and insularity in terms of scientific trading theory and other work on disciplinary boundaries and communication.     

Climate change and interdisciplinarity: a co-citation analysis of IPCC Third Assessment Report

This study addresses whether interdisciplinarity is a prominent feature of climate research by means of a co-citation analysis of the IPCC Third Assessment Report. The debate on interdisciplinarity and bibliometric measures is reviewed to operationalize the contested notion of interdisciplinarity. The results, based on 6417 references of the 96 most frequently used journals, demonstrate that the IPCC assessment of climate change is best characterized by its multidisciplinarity where the physical, biological, bodily and societal dimensions are clearly separated. Although a few fields and journals integrate a wide variety of disciplines, integration occurs mainly between related disciplines (narrow interdisciplinarity) which indicate an overall disciplinary basis of climate research. It is concluded that interdisciplinarity is not a prominent feature of climate research. The significance of this finding is explored, given that the problem scope of climate change necessitates interdisciplinarity. Ways to promote interdisciplinarity are suggested by way of conclusion.     

Indicators of disciplinary differentiation: Interdisciplinary linkages and adoption rate of biological innovations

Two indicators regarded to reflect the status of disciplinary differentiation were assessed through citation analysis. Adoption of scientific innovations (publications utilizing new scientific information) and interdisciplinary linkages (percentage of total publications of single disciplines which are cross-referenced by other disciplines) were investigated in selected biological professions. Findings indicated: 1) a significant delay in the use of innovations and a significant difference in the emphasis of interdisciplinary linkages in several professions and disciplines; 2) faster adoption of innovations and greater interdisciplinary linkages in areas with broader disciplinary contents; 3) an inter-personal communication pattern; and 4) slower adoption in applied than in basic fields.     

Investigating disciplinary differences in the relationships between citations and downloads

Several studies have examined the relationships between citation and download data. Some have also analyzed disciplinary differences in the relationships by comparing a few subject areas or a few journals. To gain a deeper understanding of the disciplinary differences, we carried out a comprehensive study investigating the issue in five disciplines of science, engineering, medicine, social sciences, and humanities. We used a systematic method to select fields and journals ensuring a very broad spectrum and balanced representation of various academic fields. A total of 69 fields and 150 journals were included. We collected citation and download data for these journals from China Academic Journal Network Publishing Database, the largest Chinese academic journal database in the world. We manually filtered out non-research papers such as book reviews and editorials. We analyzed the relationships both at the journal and the paper level. The study found that social sciences and humanities are different from science, engineering, and medicine and that the pattern of differences are consistent across all measures studied. Social sciences and humanities have higher correlations between citations and downloads, higher correlations between downloads per paper and Journal Impact Factor, and higher download-to-citation ratios. The disciplinary differences mean that the accuracy or utility of download data in measuring the impact are higher in social sciences and humanities and that download data in those disciplines reflect or measure a broader impact, much more than the impact in citing authors.     

Role of interdisciplinarity in computer sciences: quantification,impact and life trajectory

The tremendous advances in computer science in the last few decades have provided the platform to address and solve complex problems using interdisciplinary research. In this paper, we investigate how the extent of interdisciplinarity in computer science domain (which is further divided into 24 research fields) has changed over the last 50 years. To this end, we collect a massive bibliographic dataset with rich metadata information. We start with quantifying interdisciplinarity of a field in terms of the diversity of topics and citations. We then analyze the effect of interdisciplinary research on the scientific impact of individual fields and observe that highly disciplinary and highly interdisciplinary papers in general have a low scientific impact; remarkably those that are able to strike a balance between the two extremes eventually land up having the highest impact. Further, we study the reciprocity among fields through citation interactions and notice that links from one field to related and citation-intensive fields (fields producing large number of citations) are reciprocated heavily. A systematic analysis of the citation interactions reveals the life trajectory of a research field, which generally undergoes three phases—a growing phase, a matured phase and an interdisciplinary phase. The combination of metrics and empirical observations presented here provides general benchmarks for future studies of interdisciplinary research activities in other domains of science.     

A ranking of universities should account for differences in their disciplinary specialization

A bibliometric analysis of the 50 most frequently publishing Spanish universities shows large differences in the publication activity and citation impact among research disciplines within an institution. Gini Index is a useful measure of an institution’s disciplinary specialization and can roughly categorize universities in terms of general versus specialized. A study of the Spanish academic system reveals that assessment of a university’s research performance must take into account the disciplinary breadth of its publication activity and citation impact. It proposes the use of graphs showing not only a university’s article production and citation impact, but also its disciplinary specialization. Such graphs constitute both a warning and a remedy against one-dimensional approaches to the assessment of institutional research performance.     

Maps of science as interdisciplinary discourse: co-citation contexts and the role of analogy

Interdisciplinarity can be manifest in many forms: through collaboration or communication between scientists working in different fields or through the work of individual scientists who employ concepts or methods across disciplines. This latter form of interdisciplinarity is addressed here with the goal of understanding how ideas in different fields come together to create new opportunities for discovery. Maps of science are used to suggest possible interdisciplinary links which are then analyzed by co-citation context analysis. Interdisciplinary links are identified by juxtaposing a clustering and mapping of documents against a journal-based categorization of the same document clusters. Links between clusters are characterized as interdisciplinary based on the dissonance of their category assignments. To verify and probe more deeply into the meaning of interdisciplinary links, co-citation contexts for selected links from five separate cases are analyzed in terms of prominent cue words. This analysis reveals that interdisciplinary connections are often based on authors’ perceptions of analogous problems across scientific domains. Cue words drawn from the citation contexts also suggest that these connections are viewed as important and ripe with both opportunity and risk.     

Is science becoming more interdisciplinary? Measuring and mapping six research fields over time

In the last two decades there have been studies claiming that science is becoming ever more interdisciplinary. However, the evidence has been anecdotal or partial. Here we investigate how the degree of interdisciplinarity has changed between 1975 and 2005 over six research domains. To do so, we compute well-established bibliometric indicators alongside a new index of interdisciplinarity (Integration score, aka Rao-Stirling diversity) and a science mapping visualization method. The results attest to notable changes in research practices over this 30 year period, namely major increases in number of cited disciplines and references per article (both show about 50% growth), and co-authors per article (about 75% growth). However, the new index of interdisciplinarity only shows a modest increase (mostly around 5% growth). Science maps hint that this is because the distribution of citations of an article remains mainly within neighboring disciplinary areas. These findings suggest that science is indeed becoming more interdisciplinary, but in small steps — drawing mainly from neighboring fields and only modestly increasing the connections to distant cognitive areas. The combination of metrics and overlay science maps provides general benchmarks for future studies of interdisciplinary research characteristics.     

Citation Ootprint Analysis Part I: UK and US Chemical Engineering Academics

A novel method of displaying the publication and citation characteristics of outputs of researchers using a graphical "footprint" has been developed. Its first application has been to compare the publication and citation characteristics of a small group of top UK, and US academic chemical engineers. The footprint demonstrates the Relationship Factors of publications in a number of related disciplines, as defined by ISI's Journal Citation Reports. The technique has been used to compare both individual academics and each national group as a whole. The results clearly show that US academic chemical engineers are far more interdisciplinary in their output than their UK counterparts. The technique has a number of potential applications, including tracking changes in a discipline over time, tracking individual academics' output over time, and comparing different disciplines for their interdisciplinarity.     

Betweenness and diversity in journal citation networks as measures of interdisciplinarity—A tribute to Eugene Garfield

Journals were central to Eugene Garfield’s research interests. Among other things, journals are considered as units of analysis for bibliographic databases such as the Web of Science and Scopus. In addition to providing a basis for disciplinary classifications of journals, journal citation patterns span networks across boundaries to variable extents. Using betweenness centrality (BC) and diversity, we elaborate on the question of how to distinguish and rank journals in terms of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, however, is difficult to operationalize in the absence of an operational definition of disciplines; the diversity of a unit of analysis is sample-dependent. BC can be considered as a measure of multi-disciplinarity. Diversity of co-citation in a citing document has been considered as an indicator of knowledge integration, but an author can also generate trans-disciplinary—that is, non-disciplined—variation by citing sources from other disciplines. Diversity in the bibliographic coupling among citing documents can analogously be considered as diffusion  or differentiation of knowledge across disciplines. Because the citation networks in the cited direction reflect both structure and variation, diversity in this direction is perhaps the best available measure of interdisciplinarity at the journal level. Furthermore, diversity is based on a summation and can therefore be decomposed; differences among (sub)sets can be tested for statistical significance. In the appendix, a general-purpose routine for measuring diversity in networks is provided.     

Does the human capital of teams of natural science authors predict citation frequency?

This study examines the relationship between citation frequency and the human capital of teams of authors. Analysis of a random sample of articles published in top natural science journals shows that articles co-authored by teams including frequently cited scholars and teams whose members have diverse disciplinary backgrounds have greater citation frequency. The institutional prestige, the percentage of team members at U. S. institutions and the variety of disciplines represented by team member backgrounds do not influence citation frequency. The study introduces a method for evaluating the extent of multidisciplinarity that accounts for the relatedness of disciplines or authors.     

A comparative study of interdisciplinary changes between information science and library science

This study employs the method of direct citation to analyze and compare the interdisciplinary characteristics of the two disciplines of library science and information science during the period of 1978–2007. Based on the research generated by five library science journals and five information science journals, library science researchers tend to cite publications from library and information science (LIS), education, business/management, sociology, and psychology, while researchers of information science tend to cite more publications from LIS, general science, computer science, technology, and medicine. This means that the disciplines with larger contributions to library science are almost entirely different from those contributing to information science. In addition, researchers of library science frequently cite publications from LIS; the rate is as high as 65.61%, which is much higher than the rate for information science, 49.50%. However, a decreasing trend in the percentage of LIS in library science indicates that library science researchers tend to cite more publications from non-LIS disciplines. A rising trend in the proportion of references to education sources is reported for library science articles, while a rising trend in the proportion of references to computer science sources has been found for information science articles. In addition, this study applies an interdisciplinary indicator, Brillouin’s Index, to measurement of the degree of interdisciplinarity. The results confirm that the trend toward interdisciplinarity in both information science and library science has risen over the years, although the degree of interdisciplinarity in information science is higher than that in library science.     

Looking across communicative genres: a call for inclusive indicators of interdisciplinarity

Disciplines vary in the types of communicative genres they use to disseminate knowledge and citing patterns used within these genres. However, citation analyses have predominately relied on the references and citations of one type of communicative genre. It is argued that this is particularly problematic for studies of interdisciplinarity, where analyses bias the disciplines that communicate using the genre under investigation. This may lead to inaccurate or incomplete results in terms of fully understanding the interrelationships between disciplines. This study analyzes a set of 15,870 references from 97 LIS dissertations, in order to demonstrate the difference in discipline and author rankings, based on the genre under investigation. This work encourages future work that takes into account multiple citing and cited works, especially where indicators of interdisciplinarity are used for the allocation of resources or ranking of scholars.     

Patents cited in the scientific literature: An exploratory study of 'reverse' citation relations

This paper reports on a new approach to study the linkage between science and technology. Unlike most contributions to this area we do not trace citations of scientific literature in patents but explore citations of patents in scientific literature. Our analysis is based on papers recorded in the 1996-2000 annual volumes of the CD-Edition of Science Citation Index (SCI) of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and patent data provided by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Almost 30,000 US patents were cited by scientific research papers. We analysed the citation links by scientific fields and technological sectors. Chemistry-related subfields tended to cite patents more than other scientific area. Among technological sectors, chemical clearly dominates followed by drugs and medical patents as the most frequently cited categories. Further analyses included a country-ranking based on inventor-addresses of the cited patents, a more detailed inspection of the ten most cited patents, and an analysis of class-field transfers. The paper concludes with the suggestions for future research. One of them is to compare our 'reverse' citation data with 'regular' patent citation data within the same classification system to see whether citations occur, irrespectively of their directionality, in the same fields of science and technology. Another question is as to how one should interpret reverse citation linkages.     

The structure and analysis of nanotechnology co-author and citation networks

Research activities and collaborations in nanoscale science and engineering have major implications for advancing technological frontiers in many fields including medicine, electronics, energy, and communication. The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) promotes efforts to cultivate effective research and collaborations among nano scientists and engineers to accelerate the advancement of nanotechnology and its commercialization. As of August 2008, there have been over 800 products considered to benefit from nanotechnology directly or indirectly. However, today’s accomplishments in nanotechnology cannot be transformed into commercial products without productive collaborations among experts from disparate research areas such as chemistry, physics, math, biology, engineering, manufacturing, environmental sciences, and social sciences. To study the patterns of collaboration, we build and analyze the collaboration network of scientists and engineers who conduct research in nanotechnology. We study the structure of information flow through citation network of papers authored by nano area scientists. We believe that the study of nano area co-author and paper citation networks improve our understanding of patterns and trends of the current research efforts in this field. We construct these networks based on the publication data collected for years ranging 1993 through 2008 from the scientific literature database “Web of Science”. We explore those networks to find out whether they follow power-law degree distributions and/or if they have a signature of hierarchy. We investigate the small-world characteristics and the existence of possible community structures in those networks. We estimate the statistical properties of the networks and interpret their significance with respect to the nano field.     

Interdisciplinarity and the intellectual base of literature studies: citation analysis of highly cited monographs

This article studies interdisciplinarity and the intellectual base of 34 literature journals using citation data from Web of Science. Data from two time periods, 1978–1987 and 1998–2007 were compared to reveal changes in the interdisciplinary citing of monographs. The study extends the analysis to non-source publications; using the classification of monographs to show changes in the intellectual base. There is support for increased interdisciplinary citing of sources, especially to the social sciences, and changes in the intellectual base reflect this. The results are explained using theories on the intellectual and social organization of scientific fields and the use of bibliometric methods on the humanities is discussed. The article demonstrates how citation analysis can provide insights into the communication patterns and intellectual structure of scholarly fields in the arts and humanities.     

Interdisziplinarität im Entwurf

This article traces the history of interdisciplinarity as a contemporary form of thought and of producing knowledge in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1955 to 1975. It establishes that concepts of interdisciplinary research and teaching circulated in diverse fields of knowledge and modes of articulation, and evaluates the transformations that interdisciplinarity underwent along the way. After detailing the process by which the adjective “interdisciplinary” first came into usage in scientific publications in the late 1950s, this article discusses how interdisciplinary research and teaching began to feature in debates about university reforms and the founding of new universities in the 1960s. The article then draws on the examples of Bochum, Konstanz, and Bielefeld to illustrate how debates about disciplinary specialization and interdisciplinary connections unfolded in visual modes of expression such as diagrams or sketches. In a last step, the article examines how visual and textual reflections connected interdisciplinarity to the architecture of envisioned universities, and hence related this time-specific form of thought and knowledge production to the material environments of future research and teaching.     

Nanobiotechnologie: Innovationen für Medizin und Technik. Nanobiotechnology: Innovations for medicine and technics

Bio‐ and nanotechnology are two important fields of research, which give reason to new technological prospects for our future. The especial high potential of innovation at the interface between these disciplines is only entered specifically for a few years. This article gives a review of results and activities in the field of nanobiotechnology and points out related prospects of application.     

The publication and citation output of German Faculties of Economics and Social Sciences - a comparison of faculties and disciplines based upon SSCI data

Summary The purpose of this study is to quantify and compare the publication and citation output of the biggest faculties of economics and social sciences in Germany. Various publication and citation measures based upon Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) data are used to explore the comparative strengths and weaknesses of ten academic fields at the named faculties. To reflect the varying size of the fields and faculties, output measures as well as productivity measures are explicitly considered. From a bibliometric perspective empirical results demonstrate that various measures are necessary to adequately identify the comparative strengths and weaknesses of entire faculties and of selected disciplines within faculties.     

An overview of the Web of Science record of scientific publications (2004–2013) from Nepal: focus on disciplinary diversity and international collaboration

This study attempts to use bibliometry as a tool for exploration of the passage of development of the science and technology through analysis of the scientific publications from a developing country by taking into account its state of higher education and the unique political, economic and geo-bio-environmental conditions. It deals with Nepal considering its scientific output during 1966–2016 reflected as publications indexed in the Web of Science Database. Preliminary examination of the publication record for Nepal reveals a number of the following characteristics: (1) low volume, negligible growth and lack of distinct trend until 1989; (2) a marked growth followed by stagnation linked to political instability during the next 15 years; and (3) recovery and accelerated growth thereafter. Research publications during 2004–2013 increased thrice compared to 1994–2003, with expansion and shifts in disciplinary profile expressed in Essential Science Indicators 22 fields. Detailed bibliometric analysis of the 2004–2013 publications (3011 articles and reviews) from Nepal suggests the citation impact of about the world average, but very high (76%) average international co-authorship. The disciplinary profile is diverse judging from seven most productive fields (clinical medicine, plant and animal science, environment/ecology, geosciences, agricultural sciences, and chemistry) with 4–40% national disciplinary share. Clinical medicine, geosciences and agricultural sciences exhibit relatively high impact. Fields with the smaller share (< 3%), such as molecular biology and genetics, economics and business, psychiatry and psychology, materials science, and biology and biochemistry, exhibit citation impact distinctly higher than the world average. Publications from Nepal show the presence of a vast international collaborative network that is dominated by authors affiliated to institutions in the USA, India, UK, Japan, South Korea and Germany. Based on the analysis of the disciplinary diversity and the national versus global relative disciplinary shares, Nepal’s publication profile is inferred to be a hybrid of the ‘bio-environmental’ and ‘western’ models. Concerning the state of the development of science and technology in Nepal during 2004–2013, the high dependence on international collaboration in the internationally visible publications in most of the bio-environmental, physico-chemical and engineering fields points to basically a ‘building-up stage’. In clinical medicine (with a large share of public health) and geosciences, however, Nepal has demonstrated research strengths evident from the high citation impact in these fields. Moreover, the available data suggest that significant advances were made in higher education sector in both fields during the last 25 years. Despite the notable negative effect of the prolonged domestic armed political conflict on the research activities and acquisition of new data in the field-based sciences, the post-conflict period shows signs of recovery in both domestic and international collaborations leading to again an accelerated growth in scientific publications.