Category: Interdisciplinarity
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How Multidisciplinary are the Multidisciplinary Journals Science and Nature?
Interest in cross-disciplinary research knowledge interchange runs high. Review processes at funding agencies, such as the U.S. National Science Foundation, consider plans to disseminate research across disciplinary bounds. Publication in the leading multidisciplinary journals, Nature and Science, may signify the epitome of successful interdisciplinary integration of research knowledge and cross-disciplinary dissemination of findings. But how…
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Interdisciplinary topics of information science: a study based on the terms interdisciplinarity index series
Interdisciplinarity is increasingly widespread. Many technological frontiers and hotspots are emerging in the intersecting research areas. The existing measurement indexes of interdisciplinarity are mostly based on the co-occurrence of authors, institutions, or references, and most focus on the tendency to interdisciplinarity. This paper introduces a new measurement index entitled topic terms interdisciplinarity (TI) for interdisciplinarity…
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Impacts of an interdisciplinary research center on participant publication and collaboration patterns: A case study of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthes
Interdisciplinary research centers are typically viewed as a vehicle for creating opportunities in science where the intricacy of the research problem calls for persistent collaboration across multiple disciplines. This case study analyzed the effects of an interdisciplinary research center on the publication and collaboration behaviors of faculty affiliated with the center. The study also sought…
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Interdisciplinarity among Academic Scientists: Individual and Organizational Factors
Today when interdisciplinary research (IDR) is becoming increasingly important in generating innovative research results and solving complex problems in academia, discussions of IDR antecedents, processes and outcomes are becoming increasingly important in research policy and sociology of science. This study addresses two primary questions: 1) what individual and organizational factors affect academic scientists’ engagement in…
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Distance and velocity measures: using citations to determine breadth and speed of research impact
Research that integrates the social and natural sciences is vital to address many societal challenges, yet is difficult to arrange, conduct, and disseminate. This paper compares diffusion of the research supported by a unique U.S. National Science Foundation program on Human and Social Dynamics (“HSD”) with a matched group of heavily cited papers.
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Interdisciplinarity and research on local issues: evidence from a developing country
This paper examines the role of interdisciplinarity on research pertaining to local issues. Using Colombian publications from 1991 until 2011 in the Web of Science, we investigate the relationship between the degree of interdisciplinarity and the local orientation of the articles.
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The RCN (Research Coordination Network) experiment: Can we build new research networks?
The U.S. National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network (RCN) program broke new ground in funding the development of new research communities of practice. This assessment of RCN supports the conclusion that networking activity was increased for a sample set of projects compared to a control group. Journal articles resulting from RCN support score as highly…