Investigating patterns of change, stability, and interaction among scientific disciplines using embeddings

Abstract

Multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary collaboration can be an appropriate response to tackling the increasingly complex problems faced by today’s society. Scientific disciplines are not rigidly defined entities and their profiles change over time. No previous study has investigated multiple disciplinarity (i.e. the complex interaction between disciplines, whether of a multidisciplinary or an interdisciplinary nature) at scale with quantitative methods, and the change in the profile of disciplines over time. This article explores a dataset of over 21 million articles published in 8400 academic journals between 1990 and 2019 and proposes a new scalable data-driven approach to multiple disciplinarity. This approach can be used to study the relationship between disciplines over time. By creating vector representations (embeddings) of disciplines and measuring the geometric closeness between the embeddings, the analysis shows that the similarity between disciplines has increased over time, but overall the size of their neighbourhood (the number of neighbouring disciplines) has decreased, pointing to disciplines being more similar to each other over time, while at the same time displaying increased specialisation. We interpret this as a pattern of global convergence combined with local specialisation. Our approach is also able to track the development of disciplines’ profiles over time, detecting those that changed the most in the time period considered, and to treat disciplines as compositional units, where relationships can be expressed as analogy equations of the form Discipline1 + Discipline2 ≈ Discipline3. These findings can help researchers, academic institutions and organizations to better understand and react to the dynamics of scientific research, and can support the education sector in designing curricula or in the recruitment of academics and researchers.

Improving the quality of publications in and advancing the paradigms of clinical and social pharmacy practice research: The Granada Statements

“…Disciplines are shaped by and in turn help to shape human behavior. 1 Several models developed over the past 50 years attempted to classify disciplines objectively. For instance, Biglan and Becher, grounded in Lodahl & Gordon's and Kuhn's ideas, 2 , 3 , 4 argued that fields with established paradigms (e.g., physics, chemistry) have a high degree of consensus about theory, methods, and problems, while the opposite is observed for so-called “low-consensus” disciplines such as in humanities and the social sciences.…”

“…Publishing refereed work is a hallmark of science, primarily aiming at disseminating new, advanced, and high-quality research knowledge and findings as widely as possible in a timely and efficient manner. Regardless of the scientific publishing mechanisms – which have significantly evolved over the years especially in response to technological progress, 1 , 17 – this practice traverses all different academic or scientific disciplines, but customs and habits (e.g., paper length and structure, title details, citation patterns) are different across disciplines. The aforementioned on scientific progress would indicate a need for a discipline's journals, its authors, reviewers, and even its readers/followers to come together on important aspects that help propel its scientific paradigm.…”

Improving the quality of publications in and advancing the paradigms of clinical and social pharmacy practice research: The Granada statements

“…Disciplines are shaped by and, in turn, help to shape human behaviour (McGillivray et al, 2022). Several models developed over the past 50 years attempted to classify disciplines objectively.…”

“…Yet, disciplines are not rigid, well-defined entities. Conversely, they are fluid, context-dependent and multi-scale phenomena built on repeated contributions (publications, academic works) and interactions (collaboration among researchers and other stakeholders) (McGillivray et al, 2022). In this sense, it is even harder to describe, consistently define, and to attribute appropriate terminology to research areas where inter-and multidisciplinarity exist (reflecting different practices and interactions between disciplines), such as those within Pharmacy.…”

“…One of the differential characteristics of disciplines with a high degree of consensus is the consistent use of precise terms to refer to each concept. (Gernant et al, 2020;McGillivray et al, 2022). One could argue that slight differences exist among these terms.…”