Different traditions in the study of disciplinarity in science - science and technology studies, library and information science and scientometrics

Introduction. Disciplinarity and other forms of differentiation in science have long been studied in the fields of science and technology studies, information science and scientometrics. However, it is not obvious whether these fields are building on each other’s findings. Methods. An analysis is made of 609 articles on disciplinarity selected through a combination of automatic and manual methods published from 2000 to 2013. Analysis. Scientometric methods are used to determine how the different fields approach the study of disciplinarity. It seeks to establish how cognitively similar the approaches are, by exploring their use of knowledge base (derived from reference lists) and of the cognitive concepts used in the titles of works. Results. The three fields have very distinct communities of practitioners, but are similar cognitively. The three fields are using as their knowledge base similar authors, Page 1 of 15 Different traditions in the study of disciplinarity in science – science and technology studi... 11/12/2013 http://informationr.net/ir/18-3/colis/paperC34.html although not necessarily the same work by those authors. Both scientometrics and information science draw from the science and technology studies literature, which is not reciprocating. The similarity of terminology indicates that the three fields are studying the same objects, but other indicators suggest that they are actually interested in quite different aspects of those objects.