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Interdisciplinary research — Meaning, metrics and nurture, Research Evaluation, 15(3): 187-195
Abstract
Recognizing prior research and reflection, we offer a definition of interdisciplinary research (IDR) that focuses on integration of concepts, techniques and/or data. We note that this need not entail teaming. Building upon this definition, we discuss its implications for accurate measurement. We then synthesize contextual and process factors expected to foster knowledge integration. These suggest a rich set of research questions concerning the implications for successful IDR of actions by universities, funding organizations, professional associations, and the science media, including journal editors. We seek to engage social scientists who study research practices, organizations, and policy in consideration of interdisciplinary research processes and their evaluation.
... Knowledge integration fundamentally alters and shifts predominant paradigms within an area of knowledge be combining insights across disciplines. Knowledge integration is prized because it harnesses the potential of true interdisciplinarity and advances scientific innovation and breakthroughs (National Academies, 2005;Porter et al., 2006;Rafols & Meyer, 2010). This begs the question of how to measure interdisciplinary knowledge integration. ...
... We do so using a framework proposed by Rafols and Meyer (2010), which uses two primary measures-disciplinary diversity and citation network coherence. These measures have been used in a variety of bibliometric studies and widely accepted in the study of knowledge productions and integration (Morillo et al., 2003;Moya-Anegón et al., 2004, 2007Porter et al., 2006;van Raan & van Leeuwen, 2002). Rafols and Meyer define disciplinary diversity as the "number, balance, and degree of difference between the bodies of knowledge concerned" (Rafols & Meyer, 2010, p. 4). ...
... This development is driven by the belief that IDR is required to address many important societal issues (e.g., healthcare, food safety, national security, and poverty alleviation) and to achieve breakthroughs in critical technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, bioplastics, cybersecurity, and quantum computing) [3], [4]. Bringing together scientists from various fields to engage in problem solving, IDR can be defined as the integration of perspectives, knowledge, data, techniques, tools, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines [5], [6], [7], [8]. IDR also often requires boundary-spanning collaboration in hybrid organizational structures linking national laboratories, research institutes, universities, and even private companies [9], [10]. ...
... Much of the IDR literature focuses on scientists' scholarly publications because they are the primary artifacts of their problem-solving activities [8], [21], [55], [56]. Through publications, scientists share with the scientific community their solutions to complex problems [7]. ...
This research extends the problem-solving perspective of the knowledge-based view by examining the interdisciplinary publication outcomes of individual scientists in hybrid organizations. Whereas prior literature has focused on problem-solving activities in hierarchies (firms), hybrid organizations, including federally funded research programs involving interdisciplinary science, have emerged to address societal issues ranging from public health to climate change. To understand what might contribute to scientists’ performance in such hybrid settings, in this article, we theorize and empirically examine how scientists’ overall scientific reputation and their access to and familiarity with various disciplinary knowledge domains influence their publication output in interdisciplinary journals. We focus specifically on 169 researchers in the eight Nanomedicine Development Centers funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Our analysis reveals that scientists’ scientific reputation is positively related to their subsequent number of publications in interdisciplinary journals. However, scientists’ disciplinary knowledge diversity has a more nuanced association with their number of interdisciplinary publications, contributing more when moderate than when high or low. These findings will help hybrid organizations such as universities and research institutes understand how individual attributes contribute to interdisciplinary research.
... The sub-indicators were then evaluated in agreement with their usefulness, their social relevance, and the multiplicity of target groups for which the sub-indicator would be particularly useful. In the interest of building a common measurement system following Porter et al. (2006) and Hamel (2010), a very basic score assignment was proposed during the sessions in order to evaluate all indicators and sub-indicators according to three sub-criterions (0: indifferent, 1: good, −1: bad). During the restitution phase of the workshop, seminar animators and managers presented an example of a score assignment on one indicator ( Table 2). ...
... Unfortunately, the evolution of funds in the southern Mediterranean remain structurally low in terms of absolute values and in proportion to the economies of the Mediterranean countries (El-Jardali et al., 2012;Pouloudi et al., 2012;Ismail et al., 2013;Mandil et al., 2018). Even worse, the orientation toward "excellency" as quantified by publication and funding metrics did discourage the promotion of challenging research regarding these criteria (Laraus, 2004;Porter et al., 2006;El-Jardali et al., 2012); sciences as the only ones able to define in which the various motors of a SES push. ...
This article addresses the difficulty of introducing and establishing multidisciplinarity in environmental research within and among the South-Mediterranean environmental research national communities. Moreover, this work attends to assess the internal and external structural factors treating such complex issues in rural, urban, and periurban contexts as well as the connections and dependencies of these factors. Throughout a series of programs, projects, and actions that involved scientists and scholars from Algeria, France, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia, some common patterns can be observed despite notable differences in environmental and political contexts. Thus, the main common issues involve funding matters (budget reductions and less versatility), administrative and social hierarchy, relatively small connections with public services and community representatives, and finally the reluctance shown by many researchers to make data available for the community. Nevertheless, the fact that national and international (Arabic and French speaking sphere) researcher’s communities have progressively built mutual knowledge thanks to different collaborations is a major achievement, sustaining multidisciplinarity in environmental research. Indeed, this allowed the elaboration of sustainability metrics, demarches, and procedures for assessing environmentally and socioeconomically complex issues.
... The integration of methods and techniques, and/or concepts, theories and perspectives, and/ or information and data from two or more research fields Porter et al. (2006) Multidisciplinary Using methods in parallel across numerous research fields where distinct expertise is 'patchwork-quilted' together Porter et al. (2006); Newing et al. (2011) and frameworks from primatology (e.g. ecological and behavioural approaches) with the social sciences (e.g. ...
... The integration of methods and techniques, and/or concepts, theories and perspectives, and/ or information and data from two or more research fields Porter et al. (2006) Multidisciplinary Using methods in parallel across numerous research fields where distinct expertise is 'patchwork-quilted' together Porter et al. (2006); Newing et al. (2011) and frameworks from primatology (e.g. ecological and behavioural approaches) with the social sciences (e.g. ...
Hylobatids (gibbons and siamangs) are the smallest of the apes distinguished by their coordinated duets, territorial songs, arm-swinging locomotion, and small family group sizes. Although they are the most speciose of the apes boasting twenty species living in eleven countries, ninety-five percent are critically endangered or endangered according to the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species. Despite this, gibbons are often referred to as being 'forgotten' in the shadow of their great ape cousins because comparably they receive less research, funding and conservation attention. This is only the third book since the 1980s devoted to gibbons, and presents cutting-edge research covering a wide variety of topics including hylobatid ecology, conservation, phylogenetics and taxonomy. Written by gibbon researchers and practitioners from across the world, the book discusses conservation challenges in the Anthropocene and presents practice-based approaches and strategies to save these singing, swinging apes from extinction.
... Academic disciplines provide the social and intellectual structure for the organization of scientific knowledge production (Bordons et al., 2004). Unlike multidisciplinary research, in which various fields contribute their own individualized solutions to problems, true interdisciplinarity is characterized by knowledge integration, or research that merges knowledge from two or more bodies with the aim of advancing fundamental understanding and that, in turn, shapes and informs its contributors (National Academies, 2005;Porter et al., 2006;Rafols & Meyer, 2010). ...
... Rafols and Meyer (2010) proposed a framework for understanding interdisciplinary knowledge integration at various levels of analysis, including a single publication or a corpus/collection of publications. This framework grows from two primary concepts/measuresdisciplinary diversity and citation network coherence-that are consistent with measurements from prior bibliometric studies (Morillo et al., 2003;Moya-Aneg on et al., 2004;Moya-Aneg on et al., 2007;Porter et al., 2006;van Raan & van Leeuwen, 2002). ...
The interdisciplinary fields of public administration (PA), public policy studies (PP), and nonprofit studies (nonprofit) all contribute to our understanding of public affairs, but the nature and extent of their knowledge integration is empirically unclear. The current study adapts Rafols and Meyer's framework for understanding interdisciplinary research integration and applies bibliometric and qualitative methods to analyze citation trends among PA, PP, and nonprofit journal articles published between 2009‐2020. Our findings reveal that articles in PA and PP journals cite nonprofit journals at a low (but consistent) rate, while those in nonprofit journals cite their PA and PP counterparts more frequently. Using qualitative coding, we developed a taxonomy of fifteen broad research categories at the nexus of the fields: three of these (collaboration, networks, and partnerships; public service provision; and financial management) were shown to integrate knowledge from PA/PP and nonprofit, while several others indicated the potential to do so. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
... Has PA become a discipline? The literature discusses different ways to define a discipline, including having a central problem with items considered to be facts relevant to the problem and having explanations, goals, and theories related to the problem (Darden & Maull, 1977;Porter et al., 2006;Wagner et al., 2011). Broad approaches to forming a discipline have been discussed in the literature around codifying a body of knowledge (widespread agreement on a bounded body of knowledge); paradigmatic definitions around applicable laws; and consensus among scholars around theory and problems. ...
This article examines the evolution and academic status of Public Administration (PA) as a field of study. Using bibliometric analysis of 66 PA journals from 2008–2018, the authors trace PA's development through three phases: 1) an early developmental period drawing from multiple disciplines (late nineteenth century to 1950s), 2) a more inward-focused disciplinary period establishing theoretical identity (1950s-1990s), and 3) a mature interdisciplinary phase with increased connections to other fields (2000s onward). The study employs epistemic network analysis (ENA) over time to map PA's position within the broader academic landscape. ENA is a method through which connections between various elements can be identified and codified and allows for comparison of different networks ( Shaffir et al. 2016 ). The authors examine cross-citation patterns, betweenness centrality rankings, and citing environments of PA journals over time. They also conduct a detailed analysis of Public Administration Review's citation patterns from 1980–2020 as a case study of PA's evolving interdisciplinary connections. The analysis reveals PA has developed a distinct disciplinary footprint while becoming more integrated with adjacent fields like political science, economics, and management. Citation patterns show PA journals are increasingly cited by and citing other disciplines. The authors argue PA has overcome past criticisms about theoretical quality and isolation, emerging as a “bridging discipline” that connects scientific, organizational, and societal knowledge. The paper concludes that PA has evolved from having little epistemic identity to establishing itself as a legitimate social science discipline, while also becoming more interdisciplinary over time. This trajectory reflects PA's dual nature as both a theoretical field and a problem-oriented, practice-focused study.
... Quantifying the extent and evolution of IDR remains challenging due to conceptual ambiguities and methodological inconsistencies in existing measurement approaches [6][7][8][9]. Traditional methods predominantly rely on bibliometric indicators such as citation analysis, co-authorship networks, co-citation patterns, and journal classifications [10][11][12]. For instance, co-citation analysis examines the frequency with which two documents are cited together, providing insights into the relatedness of different research areas [13]. ...
Interdisciplinary research (IDR) is essential for addressing complex global challenges that surpass the capabilities of any single discipline. However, measuring interdisciplinarity remains challenging due to conceptual ambiguities and inconsistent methodologies. To overcome these challenges, we propose a deep learning approach that quantifies interdisciplinarity in scientific articles through semantic analysis of titles and abstracts. Utilizing the Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus (S2ORC), we leveraged metadata field tags to categorize papers as either interdisciplinary or monodisciplinary, establishing the foundation for supervised learning in our model. Specifically, we preprocessed the textual data and employed a Text Convolutional Neural Network (Text CNN) architecture to identify semantic patterns indicative of interdisciplinarity. Our model achieved an F1 score of 0.82, surpassing baseline machine learning models. By directly analyzing semantic content and incorporating metadata for training, our method addresses the limitations of previous approaches that rely solely on bibliometric features such as citations and co-authorship. Furthermore, our large-scale analysis of 136 million abstracts revealed that approximately 25% of the literature within the specified disciplines is interdisciplinary. Additionally, we outline how our quantification method can be integrated into a TRIZ-based (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) methodological framework for cross-disciplinary innovation, providing a foundation for systematic knowledge transfer and inventive problem solving across domains. Overall, this approach not only offers a scalable measurement of interdisciplinarity but also contributes to a framework for facilitating innovation through structured cross-domain knowledge integration.
... On one hand, references, as widely accepted norms in scientific communication, have long been seen as a means of acknowledging the works of scholarly predecessors [15]. Therefore, references reflect the knowledge that authors have acquired and integrated during the process of knowledge creation, illustrating the autonomous learning of researchers [58,59]. The higher the citation frequency, the greater the impact of that knowledge on the discipline, indicating that researchers are more likely to engage with and internalize it within their own knowledge framework [6,60]. ...
Examining the structure and acquisition mechanisms of a disciplinary knowledge system through the framework of knowledge behavior can greatly enhance science education and stimulate innovation in higher education in the long term. Within this framework, a disciplinary knowledge system can theoretically be segmented into a basic knowledge system and a knowledge network system. Drawing from knowledge structure theory and the philosophy of science, a basic knowledge system is characterized by a pyramid structure. When integrated with ecosystem research perspectives, the knowledge network system assumes a “center-periphery” circle structure which reveals the underlying meanings within the structure of disciplinary knowledge systems. On this basis, using energy chemical engineering as a case study, this paper examines a disciplinary knowledge system by analyzing citations and author collaborations in leading academic papers and explores interconnections within disciplinary knowledge systems. This process provides a methodological reference for other disciplines to identify the structure of their own knowledge systems. This study significantly contributes to educational reform and the development and innovation of academic disciplines by offering a robust framework for understanding and advancing the knowledge structures within various fields.
... In line with a number of works (National Academies, 2004, Porter et al., 20063), interdisciplinarity is defined here as a mode of research that integrates concepts or theories, tools or techniques, information or data from different bodies of knowledge. As highlighted by Porter et al., the key concept is 'knowledge integration'. ...
The multidimensional character and inherent conflict with categorisation of interdisciplinarity makes its mapping and evaluation a challenging task. We propose a conceptual framework that aims to capture interdisciplinarity in the wider sense of knowledge integration, by exploring the concepts of diversity and coherence. Disciplinary diversity indicators are developed to describe the heterogeneity of a bibliometric set viewed from predefined categories, i.e. using a top-down approach that locates the set on the global map of science. Network coherence indicators are constructed to measure the intensity of similarity relations within a bibliometric set, i.e. using a bottom-up approach, which reveals the structural consistency of the publications network. We carry out case studies on individual articles in bionanoscience to illustrate how these two perspectives identify different aspects of interdisciplinarity: disciplinary diversity indicates the large-scale breadth of the knowledge base of a publication; network coherence reflects the novelty of its knowledge integration. We suggest that the combination of these two approaches may be useful for comparative studies of emergent scientific and technological fields, where new and controversial categorisations are accompanied by equally contested claims of novelty and interdisciplinarity.
... According to a review by Klein (2008), the most commonly accepted scheme for definition of IDR is that involving three concepts: multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Each of these is characterized by a particular type of "knowledge integration", meaning the particular type of merging of theories and concepts, techniques and tools, information and data, from various fields of knowledge (Porter, Roessner, Cohen, & Perreault, 2006). According to Wagner et al. (2011) the phenomenon of knowledge integration can occur within a single mind, as well as within teams. ...
We investigate whether and in what measure scientists tend to diversify their research activity, and if this tendency varies according to their belonging to different disciplinary areas. We analyze the nature of research diversification along three dimensions: extent of diversification, intensity of diversification, and degree of relatedness of topics in which researchers diversifies. For this purpose we propose three bibliometric indicators, based on the disciplinary placement of scientific output of individual scientists. The empirical investigation shows that the extent of diversification is lowest for scientists in Mathematics and highest in Chemistry; intensity of diversification is lowest in Earth sciences and highest in Industrial and information engineering; and degree of relatedness is lowest in Earth sciences and highest in Chemistry.
... Following a series of empirical studies by Alan Porter and his colleagues (Porter et al., 2006(Porter et al., , 2007(Porter et al., , 2008(Porter et al., , and 2009), on the one hand, and Stirling's (2007) mathematical elaboration, on the other, Rafols & Meyer (2010) distinguished three aspects of interdisciplinarity: (1) variety, (2) balance, and (3) disparity. Variety can be measured, for example, as Shannon entropy. ...
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 (WoS) and Scopus. In addition to 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 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 an appendix, a general-purpose routine for measuring diversity in networks is provided.
... Among the various journal indicators based on citations, such as impact factors, the immediacy index, cited half-life, etc., a specific indicator of interdisciplinarity has hitherto been lacking (Kajikawa et al., 2009;Porter et al., 2006 andWagner et al., 2009;Zitt, 2005). Journals obviously vary in terms of the range of disciplines they cover. ...
A citation-based indicator for interdisciplinarity has been missing hitherto among the set of available journal indicators. In this study, we investigate network indicators (betweenness centrality), journal indicators (Shannon entropy, the Gini coefficient), and more recently proposed Rao-Stirling measures for "interdisciplinarity." The latter index combines the statistics of both citation distributions of journals (vector-based) and distances in citation networks among journals (matrix-based). The effects of various normalizations are specified and measured using the matrix of 8,207 journals contained in the Journal Citation Reports of the (Social) Science Citation Index 2008. Betweenness centrality in symmetrical (1-mode) cosine-normalized networks provides an indicator outperforming betweenness in the asymmetrical (2-mode) citation network. Among the vector-based indicators, Shannon entropy performs better than the Gini coefficient, but is sensitive to size. Science and Nature, for example, are indicated at the top of the list. The new diversity measure provides reasonable results when (1 - cosine) is assumed as a measure for the distance, but results using Euclidean distances were difficult to interpret.
... Such cross-field publication activity at the author level is not captured by our method but offers an additional perspective to investigate quantitatively the knowledge exchange between the two fields. In fact, depending on how disciplines are bibliometrically operationalized, several different measures of interdisciplinary communication can be devised (Porter et al., 2006). In this study, we favored an information flow approach based on citation exchanges (Leydesdorff & Rafols, 2011), but alternative approaches can be pursued. ...
We provide a quantitative analysis of the philosophy-neuroscience nexus using citation analysis. Combining bibliometric indicators of cross-field visibility with journal citation mapping techniques, we investigate four dimensions of the nexus: how the visibility of neuroscience in philosophy and of philosophy in neuroscience has changed over time, which areas of philosophy are more interested in neuroscience, which areas of neuroscience are more interested in philosophy, and how the trading zone between the two fields is configured. We also discuss two hypotheses: the supposed occurrence of a neuro-revolution in philosophy and the role of psychology as the disciplinary link between neuroscience and philosophy. Both the visibility of neuroscience in philosophy and the visibility of philosophy in neuroscience have increased significantly from 1980 to 2020, albeit the latter remains an order of magnitude lower than the former. Neuroscience is particularly visible in philosophy of mind, applied ethics, philosophy of science, but not in ‘core’ areas of analytic philosophy. Philosophy is particularly visible in cognitive and systems neuroscience and neuropsychiatry, but not in biomedical neuroscience. As for the trading zone between philosophy and neuroscience, our data show that it works differently in philosophy and in neuroscience. While some philosophy journals are active loci of bidirectional communication, neuroscience journals are divided between journals ‘importing’ philosophy in neuroscience and journals ‘exporting’ neuroscience to philosophy. Lastly, data do not support the hypothesis that a widespread neuro-revolution has transformed philosophy radically, but support the hypothesis that psychology functions as a mediating disciplinary link between philosophy and neuroscience.
... The concept of interdisciplinarity has been discussed by many researchers, and a consensus has emerged on the importance of interdisciplinarity in the process of knowledge integration (Wagner et al., 2011). Interdisciplinarity can be defined as a mode of research that integrates concepts or theories, tools or techniques, and information or data from different bodies of knowledge (Klein, 1996;Porter et al., 2006). Interdisciplinarity is seen as a highly valuable instrument for tackling pressing societal issues that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using single methods or approaches or for bringing the sciences back together (Klein, 1990;Schmidt, 2008). ...
Higher education research (HER) is often defined as an inherently interdisciplinary field of study. However, there has been limited examination of this topic, especially regarding the interdisciplinarity of Chinese HER. Using the two most widely accepted databases, this study launched two holistic investigations into the interdisciplinarity of Chinese HER using citation analysis. Study 1 examined the citation patterns between Chinese HER and education, economics, management, political science, psychology, and sociology. Study 2 analyzed and compared the interdisciplinary characteristics of Chinese and international HER. The analysis reveals that the interdisciplinarity of Chinese HER ranks in the upper center of the seven sociology disciplines. HER and other disciplines interact in an asymmetrical way, with HER acting as a “knowledge importer”. Citation analysis also reveals that HER is indeed an interdisciplinary field, although the degree of interdisciplinarity in Chinese HER is lower than that in international HER. The largest share of the cited references from both Chinese and international HER relates to educational research, yet there are differences in the disciplinary distribution of out-education citations. For Chinese HER, the most neighbouring disciplines are economics, management, and political science, whereas for those closest to international HER, psychology is the dominant discipline. Additionally, the interdisciplinarity of HER both in China and international was path-dependent. Finally, possible reasons for the patterns observed are advanced and discussed.
... The field of interdisciplinary engineering ( Figure 1, top panel) is created from the necessity to provide structured methods of education that can effectively bring together the "combinations of theories, concepts and methods from different disciplines in a single context" [13]. In other words, inter-/trans-disciplinary engineering research focuses on the integration of concepts, theories, data and expertise [2,14]. On the other hand, multi-disciplinary collaborations ( Figure 1, bottom panel) are those that also emerge from more than two disciplines but these challenges can be effectively compartmentalized into isolated sub-problems that can be fully characterized under correspondingly independent disciplines or can be looked at from multiple disciplinary angles [2]. ...
Nowadays, engineers need to tackle many unprecedented challenges that are often complex, and, most importantly, cannot be exhaustively compartmentalized into a single engineering discipline. In other words, most engineering problems need to be solved from a multidisciplinary approach. However, conventional engineering programs usually adopt pedagogical approaches specifically tailored to traditional, niched engineering disciplines, which become increasingly deviated from the industry needs as those programs are typically designed and taught by instructors with highly specialized engineering training and credentials. To reduce the gap, more multidisciplinary engineering programs emerge by systematically stretching across all engineering fibers, and challenge the sub-optimal traditional pedagogy crowded in engineering classrooms. To further advance future-oriented pedagogy, in this work, we hypothesized neuro-induced linkages between how cognitively different learners are and how the linkages would affect learners in the knowledge acquisition process. We situate the neuro-induced linkages in the context of multidisciplinary engineering education and propose possible pedagogical approaches to actualize the implications of this conceptual framework. Our study, based on the innovative concept of brain fingerprint, would serve as a pioneer model to theorize key components of learner-centered multidisciplinary engineering pedagogy which centers on the key question: how do we motivate engineering students of different backgrounds from a neuro-inspired perspective?
... The field of interdisciplinary engineering ( Figure 1, top panel) is created from the necessity to provide structured methods of education that can effectively bring together the "combinations of theories, concepts and methods from different disciplines in a single context" [13]. In other words, inter-/trans-disciplinary engineering research focuses on the integration of concepts, theories, data and expertise [2,14]. On the other hand, multi-disciplinary collaborations ( Figure 1, bottom panel) are those that also emerge from more than two disciplines but these challenges can be effectively compartmentalized into isolated sub-problems that can be fully characterized under correspondingly independent disciplines or can be looked at from multiple disciplinary angles [2]. ...
Nowadays, engineers need to tackle many unprecedented challenges that are often complex, and, most importantly, cannot be exhaustively compartmentalized into a single engineering discipline. In other words, most engineering problems need to be solved from a multidisciplinary approach. However, conventional engineering programs usually adopt pedagogical approaches specifically tailored to traditional, niched engineering disciplines, which become increasingly deviated from the industry needs as those programs are typically designed and taught by instructors with highly specialized engineering training and credentials. To reduce the gap, more multidisciplinary engineering programs emerge by systematically stretching across all engineering fibers, and challenge the sub-optimal traditional pedagogy crowded in engineering classrooms. To further advance future-oriented pedagogy, in this work, we hypothesized neuro-induced linkages between how cognitively different learners are and how the linkages would affect learners in the knowledge acquisition process. We situate the neuro-induced linkages in the context of multidisciplinary engineering education and propose possible pedagogical approaches to actualize the implications of this conceptual framework. Our study, based on the innovative concept of brain fingerprint, would serve as a pioneer model to theorize key components of learner-centered multidisciplinary engineering pedagogy which centers on the key question: how do we motivate engineering students of different backgrounds from a neuro-inspired perspective?
... Consequently, researchers, higher education administrators, policy and funding agencies are motivated to encourage and pursue interdisciplinary research projects that address societal challenges. As the interdisciplinary pursuit of solutions to real world, complex problems have become more commonplace in knowledge production and in pursuit of research funding, scholars have offered various definitions of the term interdisciplinary, and have considered its complexity and the difficulty in its measurement and evaluation (Choi and Pak, 2006;Huutoniemi et al., 2010;Klein, 1996;Miller, 1982;Porter et al., 2006). Moreover, scholars have called for more research that focuses on how organizations practice communication management in science contexts (Schafer and Fahnrich, 2020). ...
Purpose
The purpose of this research was to understand the role of interdisciplinarity in research and how communication structures and processes at universities facilitates such work.
Design/methodology/approach
Twenty-one semi-structured interviews with administrators, faculty, and staff from US R-1 Carnegie-designated higher education institutions were conducted.
Findings
Institutional culture reportedly drives interdisciplinary research efforts and participants offered different values associated with pursuing interdisciplinary work. Participants also shared formal and informal incentives that motivate their pursuit of interdisciplinary collaborations. Participants seemed to prefer a blended centralized-decentralized approach for the communication function's support of interdisciplinary research efforts.
Originality/value
This research fills a gap in understanding of how organizational capacities, structures and processes support collaborative research work and public communication about such work.
... Interdisciplinarity can be understood as crossing disciplinary borders by mutual consent (Fischer 2011) between researchers of different disciplinary perspectives or within a researcher (interdisciplinary knowledge). Interdisciplinary research includes activities "which juxtapose, apply, combine, synthesize, integrate or transcend parts of two or more disciplines" (Miller 1982: 6) dealing with complex problems which require multiple forms of knowledge (Porter et al. 2006). This shifts the discussion away from an either-or-situation and toward a question of how to integrate disciplinary perspectives (Jasanoff 2004). 2 The how is reflected in the thoughts on alternative approaches in knowledge production through expanding contexts, places, and evaluation criteria of academic research (Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001). ...
In recent years, we have been observing the phenomenon of an emerging scientific field: digital transformation research (DTR). Due to the diversity and complexity of its object of research digital, transformation is not effectively researchable if confined to the boundaries of individual disciplines. In the light of Scientific/Intellectual Movement theory (Frickel and Gross 2005), we wonder how interdisciplinarity could and should be mobilized to further advance the development of the field of DTR. To answer this question, we (a) need to understand how interdisciplinarity is conceived and (b) how it is considered in research practice by researchers in the emerging field. This is important, as scientists’ application of interdisciplinarity will highly influence an emerging field, shape its growth, consolidation as well as its academic establishment. We conducted six group discussions with 26 researchers from different disciplines and career levels (PhD students, postdocs, professors). The discussions were studied with a structuring qualitative content analysis. The results reflect the vagueness of the concept of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity is largely conceived as multidisciplinarity. Further, the interviewees mentioned more challenges than opportunities when it comes to interdisciplinary DTR. The present study widens the scientific understanding about how researchers of different career levels perceive, learn, and practice interdisciplinarity in DTR. It further provides valuable indications of how interdisciplinary research in an emerging field can be profitably shaped for practice.
... Interdisciplinary research has attracted more and more attention and one of these foci is to investigate the policy and funding of interdisciplinary research [17][18][19][20]. Several prominent institutions have begun to emphasize and encourage the development of interdisciplinary research, such as the interdisciplinary development program of the National Academy of Sciences [21]. However, the evaluation of interdisciplinary funding in the academic field is mixed. ...
Evaluating the influence of interdisciplinary research is important to the development of science. This work considers the large and small disciplines, calculates the interdisciplinary distance, and analyzes the influence of interdisciplinary behavior and interdisciplinary distance in the academic network. The results show that the risk of interdisciplinary behavior in the large discipline is more significant than the benefits. The peer in the small disciplines will tend to agree with the results of the small discipline across the large discipline. We further confirmed this conclusion by utilizing PSM-DID. The analysis between interdisciplinary distance and scientists’ influence shows that certain risks will accompany any distance between disciplines. However, there still exists a “Sweet Spot” which could bring significant rewards. Overall, this work provides a feasible approach to studying and understanding interdisciplinary behaviors in science.
... Interdisciplinarity metrics have been developed from bibliographic analyses, which provide quantitative tools for evaluating the involvement and outcomes of interdisciplinary research [12][13][14][15][16][17]. These metrics are formulated based on knowledge flow or keywords [18] or according to the cooperative relationships among countries, institutions, authors, and disciplines [19]. Because it is less dependent on expert judgment, cooperation-based metrics were selected in this study, such as variety, balance, disparity, and Rao-Stirling diversity [10,20]. ...
Interdisciplinary research is considered a source of innovativeness and creativity, serving as a key mechanism for creating recombination necessary for the evolution of science systems. The aim of this study is to quantitatively establish the connection between interdisciplinary research and the research fronts that have recently emerged in civil engineering. The degree of interdisciplinarity of the research fronts was measured by developing metrics from bibliographic analyses. As indicated by the consistent increase in the metrics of interdisciplinarity over time, research fronts tend to emerge in studies with increasing diversity in the disciplines involved. The active disciplines involved in the fronts vary over time. The most active disciplines are no longer fundamental but those associated with energy, environment, and sustainable development, focusing on solutions to climate change and integrating intelligence technologies.
... However, disaster and risk research has rarely questioned what integration means and how it unfolds as a process of change. Broader literature on interdisciplinarity problematises the notion of integration [12,36,37], highlighting that there is a fine line between 'integration as synthesis of existing knowledge' and 'integration as generation of new knowledge'. The latter brings to the fore the idea of emergence, under the assumption that the interaction between perspectives and researchers has generative or productive potential [38][39][40]. ...
The concept of disaster risk is cross-disciplinary by nature and reducing disaster risk has
become of interest for various disciplines. Yet, moving from a collection of multiple
disciplinary perspectives to integrated interdisciplinary disaster risk approaches remains a
fundamental challenge. This paper reflects on the experience of a group of early-career
researchers spanning physical scientists, engineers and social scientists from different
organisations across the global North and global South who came together to lead the
refinement, operationalisation and testing of a risk-informed decision support environment for
Tomorrow’s Cities (TCDSE). Drawing on the notions of subjects and boundary objects,
members of the group reflect on their individual and collective journey of transgressing
disciplinary boundaries across three case studies between June-December 2021:
operationalisation process of the TCDSE; development of a virtual urban testbed as a
demonstration case for the implementation of the TCDSE; and consolidation of frequently
asked questions about the TCDSE for communication purposes. The paper argues that (1) the
production of boundary objects in interdisciplinary research nurtures relations of reciprocal
recognition and the emergence of interdisciplinary subjects; (2) the intrinsic characteristics of
boundary objects define the norms of engagement between disciplinary subjects and constrain
the expression of interdisciplinary contradictions; and (3) affects and operations of power
explain the contingent settlement of interdisciplinary disagreements and the emergence of new
knowledge. Activating the interdisciplinary capacities of early-career researchers across
disciplines and geographies is a fundamental step towards transforming siloed research
practices to reduce disaster risk.
... Our choice was the interdisciplinary way of working to advance our understanding especially of the complex causal relationships concerning the spatial solutions in activity-based office environments. With interdisciplinarity, we refer to the interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR) requiring an integration of concepts, techniques, and/or data from different fields of established research (Porter et al. 2006), also considering integrating different bodies of knowledge (Rafols and Meyer, 2010) and, thereby, presuming the presence of teaming (Wagner et al. 2011). Our way of working is presently close to instrumental interdisciplinarity (Klein 1996, Aboelela et al., 2006 in bridge building between fields by problem-solving activities, seeking, but not (yet fully) achieving a synthesis or fusion of different perspectives. ...
... Our choice was the interdisciplinary way of working to advance our understanding especially of the complex causal relationships concerning the spatial solutions in activity-based office environments. With interdisciplinarity, we refer to the interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR) requiring an integration of concepts, techniques, and/or data from different fields of established research (Porter et al. 2006), also considering integrating different bodies of knowledge (Rafols and Meyer, 2010) and, thereby, presuming the presence of teaming (Wagner et al. 2011). Our way of working is presently close to instrumental interdisciplinarity (Klein 1996, Aboelela et al., 2006 in bridge building between fields by problem-solving activities, seeking, but not (yet fully) achieving a synthesis or fusion of different perspectives. ...
... Es decir, las soluciones se proponen una vez integrado el conocimiento y no desde cada área individualmente. El objetivo de la IDR es ir más allá en la comprensión de un tema o solución de un problema cuyas soluciones son incompletas cuando se aborda desde un único campo de investigación (Porter et al., 2006). Por lo tanto, hoy en día es fundamental pensar en proyectos interdisciplinarios para proponer soluciones relevantes a problemas específicos. ...
Recopila las aportaciones de mujeres y hombres preocupados y ocupados por ensayar y poner en marcha las perspectivas transdisciplinares en los análisis y soluciones de problemas complejos de la realidad. Participan expertos que ya tienen una trayectoria en este camino y nos brindan su experiencia al respecto, sus teorías y sus modelos.
... . How can we better quantify the value of the range of products resulting from SES research (e.g., Porter et al. 2006)? ...
Recognizing the continued human domination of landscapes across the globe, social-ecological systems (SES) research has proliferated, necessitating interdisciplinary collaborations. Although interdisciplinary research started gaining traction in academic settings close to 50 years ago, formal frameworks for SES research did not develop until the late 1990s. The first National Science Foundation (NSF) funding mechanism specifically for interdisciplinary SES research began in 2001 and the SES-specific Coupled Natural Human (CNH) Systems program began in 2007. We used data on funded NSF projects from 2000 to 2015 to examine how SES research was funded, where the research is published, and the scholarly impact of SES research. Despite specific programs for funding SES research within the NSF, this type of research also received funding from non-SES mission programs (e.g., Ecosystem Science constituted 19% of grants in our study, and Hydrology constituted 16% of grants). Although NSF funding for SES research originates from across programs, the majority of products are published in journals with a focus on ecological sciences. Grants funded through the Coupled Natural Human Systems programs were more likely to publish at least one paper that was highly interdisciplinary (Biological Sciences [BE-CNH] constituted 70% of grants in program, and Geosciences [GEO-CNH] constituted 48% of grants) than the traditional disciplinary programs (Ecology [ES], 35% and Hydrology, 27%). This result highlights the utility of these cross-cutting programs in producing and widely disseminating SES research. We found that the number of citations was higher in BE-CNH and ES than other programs, pointing to greater scholarly impact of SES research in these NSF programs. Through our research, we identified the need for institutions to recognize research products and deliverables beyond the “standard” peer-reviewed manuscripts, as SES and interdisciplinary research and unconventional research products (e.g., popular press articles, online StoryMaps, workshops, white papers) continue to grow and are important to the broader societal impact of these types of research programs. This project demonstrates that the outcomes and products of grants awarded through the NSF CNH programs are important to furthering SES research and the programs should be valued and expanded in the future.
... The purpose of this article is to provide a snapshot of the landscape of nonprofit researchwhere nonprofit-related work is being published and how the core nonprofit studies journals fit into that wider landscape. Such a descriptive portrait adds value by facilitating greater interdisciplinarity, which occurs when different types of knowledge (theories, concepts, methodologies, models, and/or ideas) from one discipline integrate into another in a way that meaningfully shapes and influences each (National Academies, 2005;Porter et al., 2006;Rafols & Meyer, 2010). ...
In celebration of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly’s 50th anniversary, we present a bibliometric analysis of nonprofit research published between 1999 and 2019, within and outside of three core nonprofit journals— NVSQ, NML, and Voluntas. We seek to understand which journals, across scientific domains and social science disciplines, inform nonprofit research in one of three ways, by (a) publishing articles, (b) citing the three core journals, or being cited in these core journals. We found that nonprofit research published in economics and social sciences journals has kept pace with a large increase in indexed research. Meanwhile, though the core nonprofit journals robustly cite and are increasingly cited by business and management and public administration journals, they are less engaged with other social science disciplines. We discuss ways that the core journals could increase their visibility and penetration into these other disciplines and highlight perspectives potentially missing from the core journals.
The new round of industrial revolution has put forward new development direction and requirements for Library and Information Science (LIS) research. Compared with other research fields, LIS often reflects a distinctive interdisciplinary character. The theoretical system and research methods of LIS are affected by the internal characteristics and external environment, and also need the support of knowledge and methods from other disciplines to accelerate upgrading of the discipline structure. In this paper, we collect international and domestic literature data to present the panoramic interdisciplinary system in LIS research field. The evolutionary characteristics and changes in the network structure of the interdisciplinary system in LIS research field are analyzed by measuring the relationships between the full set of disciplines. Combined with the real requirement of the current social development, we explain a series of practical problems based on the discipline development that have emerged in the stage of Inter-Disciplinary Research (IDR) carried out by important disciplines in the LIS field. Not only can this paper provide reference for clarifying the future positioning of LIS discipline, but also contribute to opening up a broader prospect and development space for the LIS research. Meanwhile, the conclusion of this paper can also help related or emerging disciplines to seek more cooperative research opportunities and application situations in the LIS.
Despite the increasing recognition for the scientific and societal potential of interdisciplinary research, selection committees struggle with the evaluation of interdisciplinary proposals. Interdisciplinary proposals include a wider range of theories and methods, involve a more diverse team, pose a higher level of uncertainty, and their evaluation requires expertise from multiple disciplines. In this study, we investigate the possibility to support the evaluation of interdisciplinary research proposals with measures of interdisciplinary research quality. Based on the literature, we curated a set of qualitative criteria and bibliometric indicators. Subsequently, we examined their feasibility using interviews with interdisciplinary researchers and a re-assessment session of a grant-allocation procedure. In the re-assessment session members of an original evaluation panel assessed four original research proposals again, but now supported with our measures. This study confirmed the potential of qualitative criteria to assess the interdisciplinarity or research proposals. These indicators helped to make explicit what different people mean with interdisciplinary research, which improved the quality of the discussions and decision-making. The utility of bibliometric indicators turned out to be limited, due to technical limitations and concerns about unintended side effects.
After the launch of Google Scholar older papers experienced an increase in their citations, a finding consistent with a reduction in search costs and introduction of ranking algorithms. I employ this observation to examine how recombination of science takes place in the era of online search platforms. The findings show that as papers become more discoverable, their knowledge is diffused beyond their own broad field. Results are mixed when examining knowledge diffusion within the same field. The results contribute to the ongoing debate of narrowing of science. While there might a general reduction in recombination of knowledge across distant fields over the last decades, online search platforms are not the culprits.
The perseverance and agility to be transformative marketing educators have been identified to be critical for the future of marketing education. In developing this observation further, this study conceptualizes the transformative marketing education (TME) concept and defines it. Furthermore, adopting a management educational institution perspective, this study proposes a framework for the implementation of TME. The proposed framework identifies the drivers of TME to be the marketing education triad, comprised of the management education institution, the marketing learners, and the external environment. The study identifies the outcomes of implementing TME as fourfold: (a) an interdisciplinary activity, (b) a value-creating activity, (c) an insights-centric activity, and (d) a “brain retrain” activity. The study also offers some variables that could moderate the outcomes of implementing TME. For the drivers and outcomes, this study offers propositions that can be tested. In addition, potential strategic implications of the TME outcomes are identified as (a) personalizing marketing education, (b) enhancing student engagement, and (c) establishing closer stakeholder connections. The study concludes by identifying a research agenda for TME.
Gender imbalance is widely acknowledged in many disciplines in academia. The focus of this chapter is to highlight the myriad benefits of including women in interdisciplinary academia. We draw on evidence from various disciplines to emphasize women’s role and potential in the interdisciplinary academic domain. Moreover, we suggest specific actions that can be taken to achieve this moral, social, and regulatory obligation toward women in academia. In light of this discussion, we stress the importance of including women in facilitating the achievement of gender equality as a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) in interdisciplinary academia.
Interdisciplinarity is a polysemous concept with multiple, reasoned and intuitive, interpretations across scholars and policy-makers. Historically, quantifying the interdisciplinarity of research has been challenging due to the variety of methods used to identify metadata, taxonomies, and mathematical formulas. This has resulted in considerable uncertainty about the ability of quantitative models to provide clear insights for policy-making. This study proposes a systemic design, grounded in an advanced literature review, to demonstrate that the quantification of the interdisciplinarity of research can be treated as a process of decision-making in mathematical modelling, where alternatives choices are evaluated based on how closely their mathematical properties align with the theoretical objectives of the research design. The study addresses modeling choices regarding the stylisation of metadata into units of observation, and the operational definition of the conceptual dimensions of interdisciplinarity, presenting both established and novel methods and formulas. The final section discusses advanced topics in modelling the measurement, including a dedicated discussion on the difference in analysing the status of papers versus collective bodies of research; and distinguishing between reflective, formative, and inferential causal models of interdisciplinary research.
What is the nonprofit sector and why does it exist? Collecting the writing of some of the most creative minds in the field of nonprofit studies, this book challenges our traditional understanding of the role and purpose of the nonprofit sector. It reflects on the ways in which new cultural and economic shifts bring existing assumptions into question and offers new conceptualizations of the nonprofit sector that will inform, provoke, and inspire. Nonprofit organization and activity is an enormously important part of social, cultural, and economic life around the world, but our conceptualization of their place in modern society is far from complete. Reimagining Nonprofits provides fresh insights that are necessary for understanding nonprofit organizations and sectors in the 21st century.
Collective creativity and innovation are key determinants of various important outcomes ranging from competitiveness of an organization to GDP growth of a country. As a result, this topic has attracted widespread scholarly interest from different disciplines, including strategic management, entrepreneurship, production and operations management, information systems, marketing, organizational behavior, sociology, economics, and psychology. However, this research remained isolated within disciplinary boundaries, which presents a major barrier for knowledge accumulation and cross-disciplinary learning. In this review, building on a new taxonomy of collectivity, we develop an integrative framework that organizes and synthesizes the fragmented research on the topic. The framework shows how antecedents related to the cognitive, social, and organizational architecture of a collective impact innovation depending on the collectivity type: attention-based, divergence-based, and convergence-based collectives. As a whole, our framework builds an integrative understanding of drivers of collective creativity and innovation and sets the stage for further theory development by facilitating communication across different disciplines. We conclude our review with an agenda for future research.
This paper provides a systematic analysis of publications that discuss data curation in interdisciplinary and highly collaborative research (IHCR). Using content analysis methodology, it examined 159 publications and identified patterns in definitions of interdisciplinarity, projects’ participants and methodologies, and approaches to data curation. The findings suggest that data is a prominent component in interdisciplinarity. In addition to crossing disciplinary and other boundaries, IHCR is defined as curating and integrating heterogeneous data and creating new forms of knowledge from it. Using personal experiences and descriptive approaches, the publications discussed challenges that data curation in IHCR faces, including an increased overhead in coordination and management, lack of consistent metadata practices, and custom infrastructure that makes interoperability across projects, domains, and repositories difficult. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research.
Interdisciplinary research has gradually become one of the main driving forces to promote original innovation of scientific research, and how to measure the interdisciplinarity of science project is becoming an important topic in the science foundation managements. Existing researches mainly using methods, such as academic degree or institutional discipline or discipline category mapping of journals, to measure the interdisciplinarity. This study proposes an approach to mine and capture the different or complementary characteristics of interdisciplinarity of projects by combining text mining and machine learning methods. First, we construct the classification system and extract a raw paper and its discipline matrix according to the discipline category of journals where the references were published in. Second, we cut the matrix to summarise the distribution of key disciplines in each paper and extract the text features in the abstract and title to form a training set. Finally, we compare and analyse the classification effects of Naive Bayesian Model, Support Vector Machine and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model. Then, the model evaluation indicators show that the best classification effect was achieved by the BERT model. Therefore, the deep pre-trained linguistic model BERT is chosen to predict the discipline distribution of each project. In addition, the different aspects of interdisciplinarity are measured using network coherence and discipline diversity indicators. Besides, experts are invited to evaluate and interpret the results. This proposed approach could be applied to deeply understand the discipline integration from a new perspective.
This paper considers how, as a relatively young academic discipline, human resource development (HRD) has undergone significant changes in terms of research approaches that constitute a relevant sum of scientific knowledge, the influence of related scientific disciplines, and the main research topics since the second decade of the twenty-first century. The results of the analysis of selected texts from five academic journals were presented and discussed on finding answers to three research questions: (1) How is the academic disciplinary framework of human resource development considered in the analyzed texts? (2) Which academic disciplines are considered necessary for building a human resources knowledge base? (3) What research topics are highlighted in the analyzed texts?
Interdisciplinary research (IDR) has been considered as an important source for scientific breakthroughs and as a solution to today’s complex societal challenges. While ample empirical evidence has suggested its benefits within the academia such as better creativity and higher scientific impact and visibility, its societal benefits—a key argument originally used for promoting IDR—remain relatively unexplored. Here, we study one aspect of societal benefits, that is contributing to the development of patented technologies, and examine how IDR papers are referenced as “prior art” by patents over time. We draw on a large sample of biomedical papers published in 23 years and measure the degree of interdisciplinarity of a paper using three popular indicators, namely variety, balance, and disparity. We find that papers that cites more fields (variety) and whose distributions over those cited fields are more even (balance) are more likely to receive patent citations, but both effects can be offset if papers draw upon more distant fields (disparity). These associations are consistent across different citation-window lengths. We further find that conditional on receiving patent citations, the intensity of their technological impact, as measured as both raw and quality-adjusted number of citing patents, increases with balance and disparity. Our work may have policy implications for interdisciplinary research and scientific and technological impact.
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the characteristics of knowledge diffusion in library and information science (LIS) to reveal the impact of knowledge in LIS on other disciplines and the disciplinary status of LIS.
Design/methodology/approach
Taking the 573 highly cited papers (HCP) of LIS during the years 2000–2019 in Web of Science and 85,638 papers citing them from non-LIS disciplines as the analysis object, this paper analysed the disciplines to which the citing papers belonged regarding the Biglan model, and the topics and their characteristics of the citing disciplines using latent Dirichlet allocation topic clustering.
Findings
The results showed that the knowledge in LIS was exported to multiple disciplines and topics. (1) Citations from other disciplines were overall increasing, and the main citing disciplines, mainly from applied science disciplines, were medicine, computer science, management, economics, education, sociology, psychology, journalism and communication, earth science, engineering, biology, political science, chemistry and agronomy. However, those disciplines had fewer citations to LIS during for the years from 2000 to 2004, with rapid growth in the next three time periods. (2) The citing papers had various topics and showed an increasing trend in quantity. Moreover, topics of different disciplines from 2000 to 2019 had various characteristics.
Originality/value
From the perspective of discipline and topic, this study analyses papers citing the HCP of LIS from non-LIS disciplines, revealing the impact of knowledge in LIS on other disciplines.
Science policy discourse often encourages interdisciplinary research as an approach that enhances the potential of science to produce breakthrough discoveries and solutions to real-world, complex problems. While there is a large body of research examining the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific discovery, there is comparatively limited evidence on and understanding of the connection between interdisciplinarity and the generation of scientific findings that address societal problems. Drawing on a large-scale survey, we investigate whether scientists who conduct interdisciplinary research are more likely to generate scientific findings with high societal visibility - that is, research findings that attract the attention of non-academic audiences, as measured by mentions to scientific articles in blogs, news media and policy documents. Our findings provide support for the idea that two facets of interdisciplinarity - variety and disparity - are associated positively with societal visibility. Our results show, also, that the interplay between these two facets of interdisciplinarity has a systematic positive and significant association with societal visibility, suggesting a reinforcing effect of spanning multiple and distant scientific fields. Finally, we find support for the contingent role of scientists' collaboration with non-academic actors, suggesting that the positive association between interdisciplinary research and societal visibility is particularly strong among scientists who collaborate with actors outside academia. We argue that this study provides useful insights for science policy oriented to fostering the scientific and societal relevance of publicly funded research.
The crucial role language plays in constituting our reality, and in achieving political influence and control, has long been known in scholarship. However, appreciation of the role of language in understanding our social realities and power relations has not been fully translated to education or even to research beyond linguistically focussed academic strands. Bringing together well-established scholars from a range of disciplines, this book demonstrates why language awareness and discourse consciousness should be considered a key skill in business and professional life, and looks closely at language in areas such as entrepreneurship, leadership, human resource management, medical, financial, or business communication, ecology, media, and politics. The authors demonstrate how the understanding of the minutiae of language use in a variety of professional contexts leads to knowledge that will empower future generations of professionals and enable them to develop a self-reflexive, critical, and more ethical practice.
This research offers a thorough examination of Journal of Forecasting (JoF) from two angles. On the one hand, this research examines a total of 1403 publications indexed by Web of Science (WoS) from 1982 to 2019. Not only some fundamental statistics like the number of publications and citations each year, the most prolific countries/territories/authors, the highly cited countries/territories/authors and papers are counted, but content analysis is also done to look at things like document co‐citation clusters and hot and emerging subjects. On the other hand, to illustrate the knowledge flow of JoF that underlies citation connections, this research, which is based on the citing papers of JoF publications, exposes the direction of JoF knowledge dissemination from Economics and Management (i.e., the categories where JoF belongs) to other categories. Moreover, a deeper investigation on semantic clustering of five representative categories is conducted to figure out what topics are the citing papers of JoF are most interested in and whether there is any relationship between the knowledge of these categories and the knowledge produced by JoF. The framework for journal evaluation presented in this research is novel and comprehensive. With this comprehensive perspective, we are able to look back on past accomplishments, identify historical patterns of knowledge spread, illustrate the current course of development and partially predict future dynamics.
The crucial role language plays in constituting our reality, and in achieving political influence and control, has long been known in scholarship. However, appreciation of the role of language in understanding our social realities and power relations has not been fully translated to education or even to research beyond linguistically focussed academic strands. Bringing together well-established scholars from a range of disciplines, this book demonstrates why language awareness and discourse consciousness should be considered a key skill in business and professional life, and looks closely at language in areas such as entrepreneurship, leadership, human resource management, medical, financial, or business communication, ecology, media, and politics. The authors demonstrate how the understanding of the minutiae of language use in a variety of professional contexts leads to knowledge that will empower future generations of professionals and enable them to develop a self-reflexive, critical, and more ethical practice.
In this presentation we argue that the core research activities of scientometries fall in four interrelated areas: science and technology indicators, information systems on science and technology, the interaction between science and technology, and cognitive as well as socioorganisational structures in science and technology.
We emphasize that an essential condition for the healthy development of the field is a careful balance between application and basic work, in which the applied side is the driving force. In other words: scientometrics is primarily a field of applied science. This means that the interaction users' is at least as important as the interaction with colleague-scientists. We state that this situation is very stimulating, it strengthens methodology and it activates basic work. We consider idea of scientometrics lacking theoretical content or being otherwise in a 'crisis-like' situation groundless.
Scientometrics is in a typical developmental stage in which the creativity of its individual researchers and the ‘climate’ and facilities of their institutional environments determine the Progress in the field and, particularly, its relation with other disciplines. These aspects also contribute substantially to the reputation of scientometrics as a research field respected by the broader scientific community. And this latter point is important, both to let quantitative studies of science and technology take more advantage of an academic environment, as well as to keep it innovative and thus attractive in terms of applications at the longer term.
In order to attribute journals to specialties in a dynamic journal set by using aggregated journal-journal citations derived from theScience Citation Index, it is necessary to complement the multi-variate analysis of this data with a time-serices perspective. This calls for a more analytical approach to the problem of choice among the many possible parameters for clustering. Changes in the disciplinary structure of science are tracked by using thedifferences among the multi-variate analyses for the various years. It is impossible to attribute change systematically to structure, noise, or deviance if these uncertainties are not clearly definedex ante. The study discusses the various choices which have to be made, in both conceptual and methodological terms. In addition to hierarchies among journals, one has to assume heterarchy among journal groups (and their centroids). For comprehensive mapping, a concept of macro-journals as representations of a density of points in the multi-dimensinoal space is defined. Empirical reslts indicate the feasibility of dynamic journal-journal mapping by using these methods.
A new form of document coupling called co-citation is defined as the frequency with which two documents are cited together. The co-citation frequency of two scientific papers can be determined by comparing lists of citing documents in the Science Citation Index and counting identical entries. Networks of co-cited papers can be generated for specific scientific specialties, and an example is drawn from the literature of particle physics. Co-citation patterns are found to differ significantly from bibliographic coupling patterns, but to agree generally with patterns of direct citation. Clusters of co-cited papers provide a new way to study the specialty structure of science. They may provide a new approach to indexing and to the creation of SDI profiles.
Interdisciplinary research can be defined by the presence of substantive, internalized linkages among component analyses. Three levels of integration of component analyses are defined. The weakest is associated with multidisciplinary research in which components stand on their own. Integration here involves editorial organization, consistent terminology, and concordant concepts. The strongest level involves a shared, over-arching theoretical framework which welds components into a unit. Most interdisciplinary research can realistically aspire only to an intermediate level of integration wherein disciplinary components serve as substantive inputs to each other.Attainment of well-integrated interdisciplinary research is a complex task. This study identifies four frameworks useful in integration based on a probe of 24 technology assessments. Common group learning generates a common intellectual property belonging to the research group. It yields well-integrated research, but often at the cost of a loss of depth of analysis. Formal modeling can structure interrelationships, and, thereby, serve as an integrating framework. Modeling is most applicable to well-specified problems, but it can contribute, in conjunction with other frameworks, to broader, policy-oriented studies as well. Negotiation among experts takes place at the common boundaries between component analyses as these substantively affect each other's findings. It preserves the full depth of expertise and can be used in broad-ranging studies. Integration by the project leader establishes one person as the sole repository of composite knowledge, obtained through one-to-one interactions with assorted experts. It is not well-suited to interdisciplinary research, except in small-scale studies.
Despite the constructive effects of a strong theoretical and conceptual basis for interdisciplinary research (IDR), no generally accepted framework has been formulated. Because of this, scholars have attempted to categorize the necessary prerequisites for the said type of study in two major divisions: external factors-which consist of problem features, reinforcement schedule, available and accessible resources, and organizational context; and internal elements-comprised of employee characteristics, management style, essential skills, project structure, and environment for group dynamics. This chapter discusses the implications of these conditions, along with their detailed description and use, to the generation of data, the analysis, and the overall success of interdisciplinary inquiries. Encountered problems are only the effects of insufficient principles and methods in employing an interdisciplinary technique to understand a specific phenomenon.
Definitions of interdisciplinarity often focus on the integration of disciplinary concepts or perspectives. Few definitions, however, are grounded in the work of faculty who conduct interdisciplinary scholarship. To better understand the practice of interdisciplinarity in research and teaching, and its implications for academics' professional lives, I interviewed college and university faculty affiliated with a variety of liberal arts and sciences disciplines in four U.S. institutions of varying size and mission. The study explored how interviewees practiced interdisciplinarity; how institutional, departmental, and disciplinary locations affected their scholarly identities, professional associations, and work lives; and the kinds of rewards they reaped from interdisciplinary work. In this article, I analyze a subset of the interviews, examining explicit and implied definitions of interdisciplinarity and their relationship to faculty members' understandings of disciplinarity and scholarly work. The analysis reveals that definitions of interdisciplinarity that emphasize integration exclude some forms of interdisciplinary work. I therefore suggest an alternative, more inclusive conceptualization that strives to encompass a range of interdisciplinary practices. Further study of interdisciplinary research and teaching might confirm that all interdisciplinary scholarship can be categorized according to the typology described here – or it might provide evidence of additional forms of interdisciplinarity.
This conference will be held April 22–28, 1979, at Schloss Reisensburg (near Ulm), Federal Republic of Germany. The conference language will be English. Priority will be given to papers offering a research or empirical perspective, and those positing a well-developed conceptual or theoretical framework. Main areas of interest include the following: problems of interdisciplinary cooperation, life history of interdisciplinary research groups, managerial problems of interdisciplinary research groups, interdisciplinary research in the organizational context, effectiveness of interdisciplinary research groups, and the role of interdisciplinary research as an instrument of research policy.
The book, The Mythical Man-Month, Addison-Wesley, 1975 (excerpted in Datamation, December 1974), gathers some of the published data about software engineering and mixes it with the assertion of a lot of personal opinions. In this presentation, the author will list some of the assertions and invite dispute or support from the audience. This is intended as a public discussion of the published book, not a regular paper.
A set of scientometric indicators of interdisciplinary links between advancing fields of biomedicine is suggested. Twenty jounals listed in theJCR of theSCI for 1988 are analyzed. An index of interdisciplinarity for a given journal is calculated as the sum of ratios between the numbers of journals from all other disciplines (except for general-scientific and miscellaneous journals) and from the same discipline cited by that journal or citing it, and of ratios between the numbers of citations to and by these journals. Some interdisciplinary patterns of 20 andrology journal articles are scientometrically assessed, too. The combined usage of this method with co-classification and co-citation methodology can optimize interdisciplinarity evaluation and promotion.
Successful interdisciplinary research performance, it is suggested, depends on such structural and process factors as leadership, team characteristics, study bounding, iteration, communication patterns, and epistemological factors. Appropriate frameworks for socially organizing the development of knowledge such as common group learning, modeling, negotiation among experts, and integration by leader are necessary. (Author/MLW)
A serious shortcoming of bibliometric studies based on the(Social) Science (s) Citation Index is the lack of an universally applicable subject classification scheme as individual papers are concerned. Subject classification of papers on the basis of assigning journals to subject categories (like those found in the various supplements of ISI databases) works well in case of highly specialised journals, but fails for multidisciplinary journals such asNature, Science andPNAS—and so far as subfields are taken into consideration-also for “general” journals (e.g.JACS orAngewandte Chemie). This study presents the results of a pilot project attempting to overcome this shortcoming by delimiting the subject of papers published in multidisciplinary and general journals by an item-by-item subject classification scheme, where assignment is based on the analysis of the subject classification of reference literature. The results clearly confirmed the conclusions of earlier studies by the authors in the field of reference analysis. For the really important journals (sufficiently high number of annual publications and high impact with respect to the field), the share of classifiable papers was surprisingly high, and the assignment proved reliable as well. Since papers in the leading general and multidisciplinary journals are frequently citing general and multidisciplinary journals, an iterated application of the procedure is expected to increase the number of classifiable publications.
The results of the new methodology may improve the validity of bibliometric studies for research evaluation purposes.
In science policy, it is often important to track emerging developments: new fields, fast-changing areas that are the focus of special funding efforts, or areas of growth or decline. This article presents methods to produce literature-based indicators for such areas using journal-to-journal citations. Using case studies of AIDS, superconductivity, and oncogenes, we posit that the inclusion of a new journal can be used as an indicator of structural change if the addition indicates the emergence of a new journal category. Using the cases of robotics and artificial intelligence, we illustrate the development of areas chosen for priority funding. Again using artificial intelligence, we demonstrate the importance of constructing even such simple measures of scientific performance as publication counts using dynamic rather than constant journal sets. Change in performance within a subfield can be systematically distinguished from change in the delineations among subfields over time.
It is often argued that interdisciplinary research is valued less in both qualitative (peer-review based) as well as in quantitative (bibliometric) assessments. A recent extensive, nation-wide evaluation of all academic physics groups in the Netherlands allowed us to investigate this problem empirically. Therefore, we first developed an operationalization of ‘interdisciplinarity’. On the basis of our findings, we refute the above statement, at least for the field and the country involved. We found that (i) peer judgements do not significantly correlate with the degree of interdisciplinarity; (ii) only elementary bibliometric indicators correlate negatively, but (iii) ‘advanced’ indicators do not correlate with the degree of interdisciplinarity, except a small correlation in the case of large programs. Thus, we found no general evidence for a peer-review bias as well as a bibliometric bias against interdisciplinary research.
Interdisciplinarity is considered the best way to face practical research topics since synergy between traditional disciplines has proved very fruitful. Studies on interdisciplinarity from all possible perspectives are increasingly demanded. Different interdisciplinarity measures have been used in case studies but, up to now, no general interdisciplinarity indicator useful for Science Policy purposes has been accepted. The bibliometric methodology presented here provides a general overview of all scientific disciplines, with special attention to their interrelation. This work aims to establish a tentative typology of disciplines and research areas according to their degree of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity is measured through a series of indicators based on Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) multi-assignation of journals in subject categories. Research areas and categories are described according to the quantity of their links (number of related categories) and their quality (with close or distant categories, diversity, and strength of links). High levels of interrelations between categories are observed. Four different types of categories are found through cluster analysis. This differentiates “big” interdisciplinarity, which links distant categories, from “small” interdisciplinarity, in which close categories are related. The location of specific categories in the clusters is discussed.
Measuring the relatedness between bibliometric units (journals, documents, authors, or words) is a central task in bibliometric analysis. Relatedness measures are used for many different tasks, among them the generating of maps, or visual pictures, showing the relationship between all items from these data. Despite the importance of these tasks, there has been little written on how to quantitatively evaluate the accuracy of relatedness measures or the resulting maps. The authors propose a new framework for assessing the performance of relatedness measures and visualization algorithms that contains four factors: accuracy, coverage, scalability, and robustness. This method was applied to 10 measures of journal–journal relatedness to determine the best measure. The 10 relatedness measures were then used as inputs to a visualization algorithm to create an additional 10 measures of journal–journal relatedness based on the distances between pairs of journals in two-dimensional space. This second step determines robustness (i.e., which measure remains best after dimension reduction). Results show that, for low coverage (under 50%), the Pearson correlation is the most accurate raw relatedness measure. However, the best overall measure, both at high coverage, and after dimension reduction, is the cosine index or a modified cosine index. Results also showed that the visualization algorithm increased local accuracy for most measures. Possible reasons for this counterintuitive finding are discussed. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Contenido: 1. Qué es la minería tecnológica: Innovación tecnológica y la necesidad de la minería tecnológica; Cómo trabaja la minería tecnológica; Qué puede hacer por usted la minería tecnológica; Ejemplo de resultados; Qué buscar con la minería tecnológica; 2. Hacer minería tecnológica: Encontrar las fuentes correctas; Formulación de la pregunta correcta; Obtención de datos; Análisis básico; Análisis avanzado; Análisis de tendencias; Análisis de patentes; Generación y presentación de indicadores de innovación; Administración del proceso de minería tecnológica; Medición de los resultados de la minería tecnológica; Ejemplo del proceso.
There has been a long history of research into the structure and evolution of mankind's scientific endeavor. However, recent progress in applying the tools of science to understand science itself has been unprecedented because only recently has there been access to high-volume and high-quality data sets of scientific output (e.g., publications, patents, grants) and computers and algorithms capable of handling this enormous stream of data. This article reviews major work on models that aim to capture and recreate the structure and dynamics of scientific evolution. We then introduce a general process model that simultaneously grows coauthor and paper citation networks. The statistical and dynamic properties of the networks generated by this model are validated against a 20-year data set of articles published in PNAS. Systematic deviations from a power law distribution of citations to papers are well fit by a model that incorporates a partitioning of authors and papers into topics, a bias for authors to cite recent papers, and a tendency for authors to cite papers cited by papers that they have read. In this TARL model (for topics, aging, and recursive linking), the number of topics is linearly related to the clustering coefficient of the simulated paper citation network.
Innovation policy is increasingly informed from the perspective of a national innovation system (NIS), but, despite the fact that research findings emphasize the importance of national differences in the framing conditions for innovation, policy prescriptions tend to be uniform. Justifications for innovation policy by organizations such as the OECD generally relate to notions of market failure, and the USA, with its focus on the commercialization of public sector research and entrepreneurship, is commonly portrayed as the best model for international emulation. In this paper we develop a broad framework for NIS analysis, involving free market, coordination and complex-evolutionary system approaches. We argue that empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that the ‘free market’ can be relied upon to promote innovation is limited, even in the USA, and the global financial crisis provides us with new opportunities to consider alternatives. The case of Australia is particularly interesting: a successful economy, but one that faces continuing productivity and innovation challenges. Drawing on information and analysis collected for a major review of Australia’s NIS, and the government’s 10-year plan in response to it, we show how the free market trajectory of policy-making of past decades is being extended, complemented and refocused by new approaches to coordination and complex-evolutionary system thinking. These approaches are shown to emphasize the importance of systemic connectivity, evolving institutions and organizational capabilities. Nonetheless, despite the fact that there has been much progress in this direction in the Australian debate, the predominant logic behind policy choices still remains one of addressing market failure, and the primary focus of policy attention continues to be science and research rather than demand-led approaches. We discuss how the development and elaboration of notions of systems failure, rather than just market failure, ca
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