Knowledge flow in China’s humanities and social sciences

Despite fruitful studies on knowledge flow and interdisciplinarity, there are few investigations on knowledge flow in humanities and social sciences (HSS) and how knowledge from science and technology diffuses to HSS sub-disciplines. Based on Chinese and English articles in HSS, this study explored knowledge flow in China’s HSS with an analysis of Chinese and English publications from 1998 to 2014. Findings include: (1) the interdisciplinarity degree of knowledge absorption in social sciences is higher than that of humanities in both Chinese and English articles, meanwhile the degree of interdisciplinarity in all HSS sub-disciplines increased constantly; (2) Chinese scholars in HSS increasingly tended to learn knowledge in hard sciences and applied it to their domains, especially in English articles; (3) in Chinese articles, Economics was the most crucial knowledge base, while Management, Education and Law were absorption-oriented subdisciplines; in English articles Management, Law, Literature and Philosophy were absorption-oriented sub-disciplines.