Knowledge domain navigation is vital to research activities, and this article addresses the epistemological and ontological dimensions of the knowledge domain navigation framework. The article addresses knowledge creation through the metadata record and how interdisciplinarity affects the metadata record. The discussion of the ontological dimension focuses on semantic navigation, interoperabili...

Since arriving at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay as Chancellor late last summer I have said the University’s commitment to the ideals of interdisciplinarity, a founding principle, is both one of our the most important assets and potentially one of the strongest inertial forces to our progress. Our claim of a unique approach to interdisciplinarity is part of our identity. It is part of ou...

Systems thinking is one form that interdisciplinarity has adopted since the middle of the twentieth century. It is a catchall term for different postwar developments in a variety of fi elds, such as cybernetics, information theory, game and decision theory, automaton theory, systems engineering, and operations research. These developments concur, however , inasmuch as, in one way or another, th...

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...

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 2...

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...

In the Nordic region the field of media and communication research has appeared fairly coherent despite the underlying broad interdisciplinarity. The reasons can partly be found in the support of biennial regional conferences, national research associations, and the Nordicom documentation centre. A similar relationship between interdisciplinarity and infrastructure can be studied at the single ...

The five-part theoretical scheme that Erich Jantsch devised to describe interrelations among disciplines provides interdisciplinarians with a sound framework for interdisciplinary knowledge. However, when Jantsch introduces the concept of human purpose into the category of "interdisciplinarity," he departs from the foundational ground of structuralist epistemology and builds his scheme for both...

The 65 papers presented at the Second Conference of the German Cognitive Science Society (Hamburg, March 1996) are discussed with respect to the extent and the nature of their interdisciplinarity. First, statistical overviews are presented that reveal several global patterns. Second, the individual papers are reviewed briefly by topic area, with particular attention to the nature of the interdi...

in his recent commentary, gorik ooms argues that “denying that researchers, like all humans, have personal opinions … drives researchers’ personal opinion underground, turning global health science into unconscious dogmatism or stealth advocacy, avoiding the crucial debate about the politics and underlying normative premises of global health.” these ‘unconscious’ dimensions of global health are...