This study explores the characteristics of scientific activity patterns through co-author affiliations to obtain new insights into interdisciplinary research. To classify the interdisciplinarity in ...research, we explored and compared two different approaches: the diversity of disciplines reflected in the listed affiliations of the authors and the diversity of the subject categories reflected in the reference list. To assess the diversity in departmental affiliations, we developed an explorative methodology that retrieves feature words from a combination of manual work and the thesaurus function in the Thomson Data Analyzer text mining tool. To assess the diversity in references, we followed the conventional approach applied in previous work. With both approaches, we relied on diversity as the measure for assessing interdisciplinarity of 157,710 articles published in
PloS One
(2007–2016). Based on a comparison between the results of both approaches, our study confirms that different methodologies and indicators can produce seriously inconsistent, and even contradictory results. In addition, different indicators may capture different understandings of such a multi-faceted concept as interdisciplinarity. Our results are summarized in a schematic representation of this twofold perspective as a method of indexing the different types of interdisciplinarity commonly found in research studies.
This book explores the making, unmaking and remaking of social infrastructure in 'left-behind places'. Such places, typically once flourishing industrial communities that have been excluded from ...recent economic growth, now attract academic and policy attention as sites of a political backlash against globalisation and liberal democracy. The book focuses on the role of social infrastructure as a key component of this story.
Seeking to move beyond a narrowly economistic of reading 'left behind places', the book addresses the understudied affective dimensions of 'left-behindness'. It develops an analytical framework that emphasises the importance of place attachments and the consequences of their disruption; considers 'left behind places' as 'moral communities' and the making of social infrastructure as an expression of this; views the unmaking of social infrastructure through the lens of 'root shock'; and explains efforts at remaking it in terms of the articulation of 'radical hope'.
The analysis builds upon a case study of a former mining community in County Durham, North East England. Using mixed methods, it offers a 'deep place study' of a single village to understand more fully the making, unmaking and remaking of social infrastructure. It shows how a place once richly endowed with social infrastructure, saw this endowment wither and the effects this had on the community. However, it also records efforts of the local people to rebuild social infrastructure, typically drawing the lessons of the past. Although the story of one village, the methods, results and policy recommendation have much wider applicability.
The book will be of interest to researchers, policy makers and others concerned with the fate of 'left behind places'.
This book explores the making, unmaking and remaking of social infrastructure in 'left-behind places'. Using mixed methods, the analysis builds upon a case study of a former mining community in County Durham, North East England and will be of interest to researchers, policy makers and others concerned with the fate of 'left behind places'.
Supply chains form the backbone of modern economies and therefore require reliable information flows. In practice, however, supply chains face severe technical challenges, especially regarding ...security and privacy. In this work, we consolidate studies from supply chain management, information systems, and computer science from 2010–2021 in an interdisciplinary meta-survey to make this topic holistically accessible to interdisciplinary research. In particular, we identify a significant potential for computer scientists to remedy technical challenges and improve the robustness of information flows. We subsequently present a concise information flow-focused taxonomy for supply chains before discussing future research directions to provide possible entry points.
Science and the legal rights of nature Epstein, Yaffa; Ellison, Aaron M; Echeverría, Hugo ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
05/2023, Volume:
380, Issue:
6646
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We review the use of science by lawmakers and courts in implementing or rejecting legal rights for nature in Ecuador, India, the United States, and other jurisdictions where some type of rights of ...nature have been recognized in the legal system. We then use the "right to evolve" to exemplify how interdisciplinary work can (i) help courts effectively define what this right might entail; (ii) inform how it might be applied in different circumstances; and (iii) provide a template for how scientists and legal scholars can generate the interdisciplinary scholarship necessary to understand and implement the growing body of rights-of-nature laws, and environmental law more generally. We conclude by pointing to what further research is needed to understand and effectively implement the growing body of rights-of-nature laws.
Medicinal chemistry is a fast-evolving interdisciplinary research area which aims to improve human life by developing drugs to combat diseases. Nature Communications interviewed three scientists, ...Daniele Castagnolo (Associate Professor at University College London), Paramita Sarkar (postdoctoral researcher at University of Würzburg) and Dani Schulz (Director, Discovery Process Chemistry at Merck), about their careers and the past and future in medicinal chemistry research. We asked the researchers what medicinal chemistry means to them, and their opinions on the current relevance of the Rule of Five and new chemical modalities beyond the Rule of Five. We also discuss the differences between academic and industry research in medicinal chemistry and how Open Science can support collaborations for drug development.
Finding new ways to help researchers and administrators understand academic fields is an important task for information scientists. Given the importance of interdisciplinary research, it is essential ...to be aware of disciplinary differences in aspects of scholarship, such as the significance of recent changes in a field. This paper identifies potential changes in 25 subject categories through a term comparison of words in article titles, keywords and s in 1 year compared to the previous 4 years. The scholarly influence of new research issues is indirectly assessed with a citation analysis of articles matching each trending term. While topic‐related words dominate the top terms, style, national focus, and language changes are also evident. Thus, as reflected in Scopus, fields evolve along multiple dimensions. Moreover, while articles exploiting new issues are usually more cited in some fields, such as Organic Chemistry, they are usually less cited in others, including History. The possible causes of new issues being less cited include externally driven temporary factors, such as disease outbreaks, and internally driven temporary decisions, such as a deliberate emphasis on a single topic (e.g., through a journal special issue).
Language plays a pivotal role in the evolution of human culture, yet the evolution of the capacity for language—uniquely within the hominin lineage—remains little understood. Bringing together ...insights from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, archaeology and behavioural ecology, we hypothesize that this singular occurrence was triggered by exaptation, or ‘hijacking’, of existing cognitive mechanisms related to sequential processing and motor execution. Observed coupling of the communication system with circuits related to complex action planning and control supports this proposition, but the prehistoric ecological contexts in which this coupling may have occurred and its adaptive value remain elusive. Evolutionary reasoning rules out most existing hypotheses regarding the ecological context of language evolution, which focus on ultimate explanations and ignore proximate mechanisms. Coupling of communication and motor systems, although possible in a short period on evolutionary timescales, required a multi-stepped adaptive process, involving multiple genes and gene networks. We suggest that the behavioural context that exerted the selective pressure to drive these sequential adaptations had to be one in which each of the systems undergoing coupling was independently necessary or highly beneficial, as well as frequent and recurring over evolutionary time. One such context could have been the teaching of tool production or tool use. In the present study, we propose the Cognitive Coupling hypothesis, which brings together these insights and outlines a unifying theory for the evolution of the capacity for language.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Bridging cultural gaps: interdisciplinary studies in human cultural evolution’.
•Analyzing video-recorded clinical encounters requires specialized skills.•Interdisciplinary teams can optimize research quality and clinical relevance.•Secondary projects using videos can compensate ...for extensive analysis time.•Combining different theoretical and analytic traditions generates novel approaches.•Plan time for solving regulatory, logistic, and methodological challenges.
Patient-clinician interactions are central to technical and interpersonal processes of medical care. Video recordings of these interactions provide a rich source of data and a stable record that allows for repeated viewing and analysis. Collecting video recordings requires navigating ethical and feasibility constraints; further, realizing the potential of video requires specialized research skills. Interdisciplinary collaborations involving practitioners, medical educators, and social scientists are needed to provide the clinical perspectives, methodological expertise, and capacity needed to make collecting video worthwhile. Such collaboration ensures that research questions will be based on scholarship from the social sciences, resonate with practice, and produce results that fit educational needs. However, the literature lacks suggested practices for building and sustaining interdisciplinary research collaborations involving video data. In this paper, we provide concrete advice based on our experience collecting and analyzing a single set of video-recorded clinical encounters and non-video data, which have so far yielded nine distinct studies. We present the research process, timeline, and advice based on our experience with interdisciplinary collaboration. We found that integrating disciplines and traditions required patience, compromise, and mutual respect; learning from each other enhanced our enjoyment of the process, our productivity, and the clinical relevance of our research.
Current concept, development, and testing applications in production concerning Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Industry 4.0 (I40), and Internet of Things (IoT) are mainly addressing fully autonomous ...systems, fostered by an increase in available technologies regarding distributed decision-making, sensors, and actuators for robotics systems. This is applied also to production logistics settings with a multitude of transport tasks, e.g., between warehousing or material supply stations and production locations within larger production sites as for example in the automotive industry. In most cases, mixed environments where automated systems and humans collaborate (e.g., cobots) are not in the center of analysis and development endeavors although the worker’s adoption and acceptance of new technologies are of crucial relevance. From an interdisciplinary research perspective, this constitutes an important research gap, as the future challenges for successful automated systems will rely mainly on human-computer interaction (HCI) in connection with an efficient collaboration between motivated workers, automated robotics, and transportation systems. We develop a HCI efficiency description in production logistics based on an interdisciplinary analysis consisting of three interdependent parts: (i) a production logistics literature review and process study, (ii) a computer science literature review and simulation study for an existing autonomous traffic control algorithm applicable to production logistics settings with the specific inclusion of human actors, and (iii) a work science analysis for automation settings referring to theoretical foundations and empirical findings regarding the management of workers in digital work settings. We conclude with practical implications and discuss avenues for future research and business applications.
Cognitive science was established as an interdisciplinary domain of research in the 1970s. Since then, the domain has flourished, despite disputes concerning its interdisciplinarity. Multiple methods ...exist for the assessment of interdisciplinary research. The present study proposes a methodology for quantifying interdisciplinary aspects of research in cognitive science. We propose models for text similarity analysis that provide helpful information about the relationship between publications and their specific research fields, showing potential as a robust measure of interdisciplinarity. We designed and developed models utilizing the Doc2Vec method for analyzing cognitive science and related fields. Our findings reveal that cognitive science collaborates closely with most constituent disciplines. For instance, we found a balanced engagement between several constituent fields—including psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science—that contribute significantly to cognitive science. On the other hand, anthropology and neuroscience have made limited contributions. In our analysis, we find that the scholarly domain of cognitive science has been exhibiting overt interdisciplinary for the past several decades.
PDF
