It is natural to subdivide science into disciplines that can focus on particular aspects of scientific inquiry. This becomes a problem when two or more disciplines are required to solve a complex research problem. For example, the successful development and delivery of a new drug to treat cancer could require close collaboration between cancer biologists, chemists, engineers, pharmacologists, physicians, statisticians, and so on. Thus, interdisciplinary science is needed to move some research forward.
Chen et al. focus on this question of interdisciplinary research within the scientific discipline of biochemistry and molecular biology (BMB). They used the Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS) resource to identify more than 1.5 million individual documents from the BMB discipline and their many citations. By examining citation patterns related to other disciplines, the authors were able to infer the degree of interdisciplinarity and how it changed over time.
An interesting component of the analysis was the use of data visualization methods. They used methods such as VOSviewer to display the relationships between BMB and other disciplines. It is clear from the figures that disciplines such as cellular biology, pathology, and general biology are much more closely related to BMB than others such as geology and operations research. Particularly interesting was the plot of discipline citations by year. This allows the reader to quickly assess the change of disciplines over time. For example, it is clear that physiology was cited often as a discipline in the early 1900s, but was replaced later by new disciplines such as cancer and pharmacology.
It would be interesting to analyze this data at a finer-grained level to identify the key content in citations from seemingly unrelated disciplines. For example, what are the papers that are being cited from geology and do they represent some innovative new technology or methodology that is useful for BMB? One could imagine that having this kind of information in real time might accelerate the adoption of hot new methods from other disciplines.
