Interdisciplinarity and insularity in the diffusion of knowledge: an analysis of disciplinary boundaries between philosophy of science and the sciences

Abstract

Two fundamentally different perspectives on knowledge diffusion dominate debates about academic disciplines. On the one hand, critics of disciplinary research and education have argued that disciplines are isolated silos, within which specialists pursue inward-looking and increasingly narrow research agendas. On the other hand, critics of the silo argument have demonstrated that researchers constantly import and export ideas across disciplinary boundaries. These perspectives have different implications for how knowledge diffuses, how intellectuals gain and lose status within their disciplines, and how intellectual reputations evolve within and across disciplines. We argue that highly general claims about the nature of disciplinary boundaries are counterproductive, and that research on the nature of specific disciplinary boundaries is more useful. To that end, this paper uses a novel publication and citation network dataset and statistical models of citation networks to test hypotheses about the boundaries between philosophy of science and 11 disciplinary clusters. Specifically, we test hypotheses about whether engaging with and being cited by scientific communities outside philosophy of science has an impact on one's position within philosophy of science. Our results suggest that philosophers of science produce interdisciplinary scholarship, but they tend not to cite work by other philosophers when it is published in journals outside of their discipline. Furthermore, net of other factors, receiving citations from other disciplines has no meaningful impact-positive or negative-on citations within philosophy of science. We conclude by considering this evidence for simultaneous interdisciplinarity and insularity in terms of scientific trading theory and other work on disciplinary boundaries and communication.

Show me the numbers: a quantitative portrait of the attitudes, experiences, and values of philosophers of science regarding broadly engaged work

“…Furthermore, as we demonstrate elsewhere, there is evidence to suggest that philosophers' broader impacts are much more likely to come from face-to-face engagement with other communities than by publishing in philosophy journals alone (see Plaisance et al 2019). Our citation study revealed something similar: for the most part, when it comes to citing publications by philosophers of science, scientists tend to cite those publications that appear in science journals, while other philosophers are more likely to cite publications appearing in philosophy journals (McLevey et al 2018). This lack of disciplinary cross-over suggests that disseminating one's work to scientific communities is essential for philosophers of science who wish to have their work taken up in scientific domains.…”

“…We report the results of that research elsewhere (Plaisance et al 2019), though we do mention some of our qualitative findings below to provide context for the survey data. Furthermore, knowing that both surveys and interviews rely on self-report, our project also includes a bibliometric study of the citation patterns of philosophy of science articles in order to better understand broader uptake of philosophical work (McLevey et al 2018).…”

Nature of Science (NOS) Being Acquainted with Science of Science (SoS): Providing a Panoramic Picture of Sciences to Embody NOS for Pre-Service Teachers

“…The advantages and disadvantages of the disciplinary structure for advancement of sciences are currently much discussed, with conclusions that favour interdisciplinarity for the advancement of sciences [62,63,71,82,85,86]. However, the degree to which interdisciplinarity is realized, and even its benefits, are questioned and disputed [87].…”

Working groups, gender and publication impact of Canada’s ecology and evolution faculty

“…Therefore, we decided to use WOS for our data needs. As a curated collection of scientific scholarly content, WOS's level of bibliometric coverage of scientific literature is very similar to that offered by other licensed indexing services (McLevey et al 2018).…”