Types and levels of collaboration in interdisciplinary research in the sciences

Abstract

It is common today for scientists to conduct research in collaboration with their colleagues from different institutions and disciplines. This study collected a sample of 846 scientific research papers published in 1992 and tested three hypotheses on the relationship between research collaboration and interdisciplinarity. Collaboration was measured by the number of authors, number of institutional affiliations, number of affiliation disciplines, and type of collaboration. Interdisciplinarity was measured by the number of disciplines represented in the journals cited. The results showed significant differences in degrees of interdisciplinarity among different levels of collaboration and among different disciplines. Some disciplines were shown to be highly collaborative, while others were not. This analysis led to the conclusion that collaboration contributed significantly to the degree of interdisciplinarity in some disciplines and not in others. In addition to an analysis of publications, this investigation used a survey that asked authors about their forms of collaboration, channels of communication, and use of information. The survey provided some qualitative explanation for the bibliometric findings. Findings are discussed from the perspective of scientist‐scientist interaction, scientist‐information interaction, and information‐information interaction. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and patterns of research collaboration in nanoscience and nanotechnology

“…Similarly, co-classification analyses count the number of co-occurrences of discipline-specific headings, which, in contrast to keywords, are usually assigned by professional information managers and thus refer to a more systematic and broader scheme developed for a database (e.g., TIJSSEN, 1992;MORILLO et al, 2001). Instead of keywords and headings, co-author analyses count the co-occurrences of disciplinary affiliations of co-authors (e.g., QIU, Scientometrics 59 (2004) 1992; QIN et al, 1997). Finally, assuming that every paper can be considered belonging to one discipline, citation analyses count citations between papers of different disciplines as links between these disciplines (e.g., PORTER & CHUBIN, 1985;TOMOV & MUTAFOV, 1996).…”

Why do academic scientists engage in interdisciplinary research?

“…They measure flows of information between papers (Qin et al, 1997), journals (Porter and Chubin, 1985 ;Morillo et al, 2001), or disciplines (Qin et al, 1997). For instance, Tomov and Mu-tafov (1996) have proposed an interdisciplinary index of journals using both references and citations.…”

“…Although an abundant literature substantially improved our understanding of interdisciplinary research (Morreale and Howery, 2002 ;Ziman, 1997 ;Qin et al, 1997 ;Schmoch et al, 1994 ;Sanz-Menéndez et al, 2001 ;Tomov and Mutafov, 1996 ;Morillo et al, 2001), it remains a difficult and quite fuzzy concept (Klein, 1990 andAcutt et al, 2000). For the purpose of this study, we propose and make use of two new measures.…”

University–Industry Interaction Trends in the Baltic Sea Region: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…The conducted research (Qin et al, 1997;Katz & Martin, 1997;Calvert & Patel, 2003;Butcher & Jeffrey, 2005) allows to identify the trends typical of the present. On the one hand, it is the increasing interest in such a method of evaluation as bibliometric analysis due to the general public accessibility and a high degree of systematisation of information databases and increase in the number of papers co-authored by three or more people that may characterise a wide involvement, interaction and exchange of knowledge among researchers in one area.…”