Exploring the interdisciplinary evolution of a discipline: the case of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Shiji Chen (), Clément Arsenault (), Yves Gingras () and Vincent Larivière ()
Additional contact information
Shiji Chen: Library of China Agricultural University
Clément Arsenault: Université de Montréal
Yves Gingras: Université du Québec à Montréal
Vincent Larivière: Université de Montréal

Scientometrics, 2015, vol. 102, issue 2, No 11, 1307-1323

Abstract: Abstract This study explores interdisciplinarity evolution of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (BMB) over a one-hundred-year period on several fronts, namely: change in interdisciplinarity, identification of core disciplines, disciplinary emergence, and potential discipline detection, in order to assess the evolution of interdisciplinarity over time. Science overlay maps and a StreamGraph were used to visualize interdisciplinary evolution. Our study confirms that interdisciplinarity evolves mainly from neighbouring fields to distant cognitive areas and provides evidence of an increasing tendency of BMB researchers to cite literature from other disciplines. Additionally, from our results, we can see that the top potential interdisciplinary relations belong to distant disciplines of BMB; their share of references is small, but is increasing markedly. On the whole, these results confirm the dynamic nature of interdisciplinary relations, and suggest that current scientific problems are increasingly addressed using knowledge from a wide variety of disciplines.

Keywords: Interdisciplinarity; Bibliometrics; References; Information visualisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-014-1457-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:102:y:2015:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-014-1457-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-014-1457-6

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().