Science, interdisciplinarity, and the society

Science, interdisciplinarity, and the society

Scientific research is organized within a range of different disciplines. Besides some historical contingence, the recent landscape of academics reflects mainly divisions between different objects, terminologies, theories, and methods, which are represented by the specific disciplines. Correspondingly, a huge number of (sub-) disciplines have been established until now. Research within these di...

Classification, interdisciplinarity, and the study of science

Interdisciplinarity of Cognitive Science 1

Introduction Cognitive science is a relatively young field. Its beginnings are typically dated in the 1950s, and it did not become a large-scale activity (with a society, meetings, and degree programs) until the late 1970s or early 1980s. As in most young fields, one of the salient features of cognitive science is its interdisciplinarity. All definitions of cognitive science make important ment...

The progress of interdisciplinarity in invasion science.

Interdisciplinarity is needed to gain knowledge of the ecology of invasive species and invaded ecosystems, and of the human dimensions of biological invasions. We combine a quantitative literature review with a qualitative historical narrative to document the progress of interdisciplinarity in invasion science since 1950. Our review shows that 92.4% of interdisciplinary publications (out of 919...

The Interdisciplinarity of Collaborations in Cognitive Science

We introduce a new metric for interdisciplinarity, based on co-author publication history. A published article that has co-authors with quite different publication histories can be deemed relatively "interdisciplinary," in that the article reflects a convergence of previous research in distinct sets of publication outlets. In recent work, we have shown that this interdisciplinarity metric can p...