The Interdisciplinary Research Network
I do research in bioprocess engineering, where chemical engineering meets biology and biomedical engineering. Salmon sperm are used to make it easier to insert human genes into yeast cells. The field is a jumble of advances from all domains of pure science and previous engineering, using medical advances in disease identification to find areas where biological organisms can be modified to better assist with drug production or improve consumer products.
I have always wondered – how connected are these fields truly becoming? Are scientists taking ideas from other disciplines without the process going full circle – the knowledge they uncover being used again in the fields the ideas came from?
In the introduction to graph theory, the textbook mentions a web of scientists within a university department that have copublished journal articles, where nodes are individual researchers and an edge between them represents an article on which they were both articles.
A Nature article from 2015 (https://www.nature.com/news/interdisciplinary-research-by-the-numbers-1.18349) analyzed citations in >35 million scientific journal articles, examining the percentage of citations that were within and between fields. Since the 1980s, in the natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences, the percentage of references to other papers in the same discipline decreased while references to sources in other fields increased markedly.
If citations are imagined as directed edges, and articles as nodes, this data can be visualized as a graph. Previously, the graph contained a few local bridges linking clusters of articles within the same field. Over time, the clusters have become less distinct, diminishing the relative importance of the original local bridges as more nodes are added, positioned between the formerly distinct clusters.
What does the future of this network look like? Is the new structure due to technological advances, such as embedding direct links (another edge example!) inside one paper to the sources it cites? Has the emergence of massive digital databases made research that would go unnoticed pop up on scientist’s screens? How do countries vary in their collaboration, and could we somehow position articles to encourage collaboration with developing countries? These are all questions that have yet to be answered, but which could potentially be solved by network analysis on international, interdisciplinary scientific connections.