Interdisciplinary research networks

Summary

Fields of Research are more often than not isolated from one another in terms of their community, jargon, perspective, research programme (in the sense of Lakatos) and their journals and lots more. This isolation stands in the way of a fruitful merging and interaction of fields. One needs to understand the obstructions.

Objectives

• To understand the factors that lead to interdisciplinary work
• To compare the success of interdisciplinary papers with single discipline papers
• To apply network methods to citation datasets
• To gain insight into how interdisciplinary research might be better supported

Members

Leo Horstmeyer (horstmey@mis.mpg.de )
Jennifer Hellmann
Anna Olson
Lin Li (linnlii2495 at gmail dot com)
Stefan Pfenninger
Catherine Bale

Methods

Datasets

arXiv

Data from 1991-2007
Includes: doi, journal_ref, primary_category, category, id, link, published, summary title, updated names
Info on metadata

APS

Data from 1893-2010
Includes: Authors, Affiliation, DOI, title,subject classifications

Specific research questions

Static network:
Q1. Is there a difference in the likelihood of getting published in disciplinary vs interdisciplinary work?
Q2.

Dynamical network:

General:

Q1. How can interdisciplinary work be supported?
Q2. Do interdisciplinary paper take longer to review?

Analysis

- Someone of the other groups posted this python-based dynamic systems simulator : http://pycx.sourceforge.net/
- check this out. An ngram with the words interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, intradisciplinary etc https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=intradisciplinary,multidisciplinary,interdisciplinary,transdisciplinary&year_start=1940&year_end=2013&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share&

For static networks:
Choose a 5-year subset

Assumptions:
ArXiv data If a paper is published, there is no bias as to whether people update
Cut off analysis post end-2012 (to allow for long review periods, people not updating records)- assume all previous are published if they are going to be.
Measure of interdisciplinary? affiliations, tagged in different categories e.g. interdisciplinarity of an author is fraction of papers published in interdisciplinary fields
or represent links - the links represent interdisciplinary
Q. Multidisciplinary vs interdisciplinary??