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

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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.

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Notes

  1. http://www.vosviewer.com/.

  2. Due to the fact that BMB accounts for a large proportion of the references it makes the StreamGraph displays all core discipline except for BMB as it would occupy a large space and squeeze other core disciplines’ space in the map.

  3. Molecular Biology could be regarded as being part of Biochemistry. After the publication of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, research concerning DNA in Biochemistry is usually called Molecular Biology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Library of China Agricultural University, 2 Yuanmingyuan West Road, Beijing, China

    Shiji Chen

  2. École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Shiji Chen, Clément Arsenault & Vincent Larivière

  3. Observatoire des Sciences et des Technologies (OST), Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur la Science et la Technologie (CIRST), Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Yves Gingras & Vincent Larivière

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  1. Shiji Chen
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  2. Clément Arsenault
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  3. Yves Gingras
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  4. Vincent Larivière
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Correspondence to Clément Arsenault.

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Chen, S., Arsenault, C., Gingras, Y. et al. Exploring the interdisciplinary evolution of a discipline: the case of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Scientometrics 102, 1307–1323 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1457-6

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