A study of interdisciplinarity in information science: using direct citation and co-authorship analysis

Huang, Mu‐Hsuan; Chang, Yu-Wei

doi:10.1177/0165551511407141

Cited by 66 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Second, we used Brillouin's index (Brillouin, 1956) to assess the overall interdisciplinarity of each corpus. This index is used as a measure of population diversity in the field of ecology (e.g., Peet, 1975), and has been used to assess interdisciplinarity in other research fields (e.g., Huang & Chang, 2011;Steele & Stier, 2000). We chose to use Brillouin's index rather than a measure of sample diversity because of the exhaustive nature of our literature search, suggesting that our corpus is more accurately characterized as a population (i.e., all empirical MOOC research published in English in the time period described) than a sample (i.e., a portion of the research fulfilling those criteria).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There has also been research examining how the level of interdisciplinarity in a field changes over time. For instance, Huang and Chang (2011) demonstrated that research in Information Science has become increasingly interdisciplinary over the course of three decades. If interdisciplinarity does allow for a more rounded perspective on research problems, such changes may indicate a field's increasing sophistication and complexity -particularly if this field is relatively nascent.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is important to note however, that there is no consensus in the literature on how to evaluate interdisciplinarity (Huutoniemi, Klein, Bruun, & Hukkinen, 2010;Wagner et al, 2011). Direct citation and co-authorship analysis for example, were two other approaches that we could have used to gauge interdisciplinary writing and changes over time (e.g., Huang & Chang, 2011 Finally, it is possible that narrower or coarser definitions of disciplines would have led to different outcomes of our statistical analyses. In coding the author affiliations, we selected disciplinary categories based on author self-reporting and guided in the first instance by the granularity of the disciplines described in Gašević and colleagues' (2014) paper on MRI submissions.…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Who studies MOOCs? Interdisciplinarity in MOOC research and its changes over time

Veletsianos

Shepherdson

2015

IRRODL

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The complexity of digital and online education is becoming increasingly evident in the context of research into networked learning/participation. Interdisciplinary research is often proposed as a way to address complex scientific problems and enable researchers to bring novel perspectives into a field other than their own. The degree to which research on Massive Open Online Courses suggest that empirical research on xMOOCs may be more interdisciplinary than research on cMOOCs. Greater interdisciplinarity in xMOOC research could reflect the burgeoning interest in the field, the general familiarity with the xMOOC pedagogical model, and the hype experienced by xMOOCs. Greater interdisciplinarity in the field may also provide researchers with rich opportunities to improve our understanding and practice of digital and online learning. (Pellmar & Eisenberg, 2000). KeywordsNevertheless, in their assessment of proposals submitted for funding under the MOOC research initiative (henceforth MRI), Gašević, Kovanović, Joksimović, and Siemens (2014) show that more than 50% of the authors in all phases of the MRI grants were from the field of education, even though a common perception in the field is that the MOOC phenomenon is "driven by computer scientists" (p. 166). Research into emerging forms of digital learning is likely to suffer if driven by education researchers alone or computer scientists alone. As Gašević and colleagues note, disparate involvement in MOOC research "could be a worrying sign of the fragmentation in the research community", and as such there is a need to "[increase] efforts towards enhancing interdisciplinarity" (p. 134).We have recently completed a systematic review of the empirical MOOC literature published between (Veletsianos & Shepherdson, 2015, and as a result of that study, we can use bibliometric data to investigate the extent to which interdisciplinarity is present in the published literature on MOOCs. Thus, in this paper, we combine our data with data from Gašević et al. (2014), and data used in a past systematic review of the literature (Liyanagunawardena, Adams, & Williams, 2013), to examine interdisciplinarity in the MOOC literature, and whether and how this has changed over time.To examine these issues, we review relevant literature and explain why this study is significant; describe the methods used to conduct this investigation; present the results; and conclude by discussing the implications and limitations of the findings. Who Studies Moocs? Interdisciplinarity in MOOC Research and its Changes over Time Veletsianos and ShepherdsonThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 3 Literature ReviewInterdisciplinary research is "any study or group of studies undertaken by scholars from two or more distinct scientific disciplines" (Aboelela et al., 2007, p. 341). The value of interdisciplinary research and collaboration rests in both the complexity of the problems societies are faced with (Pellmar & Eisenberg, 2000), and in the novel perspec...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Who studies MOOCs? Interdisciplinarity in MOOC research and its changes over time

Veletsianos

Shepherdson

2015

IRRODL

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“…Liu et al (2005) adopted the social network measures of degree, closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality to explore individuals' positions in a given co-authorship network. Similar to many of the studies on co-authorship network (Ding-quan et al 2009;Huang and Chang 2011), in this study we consider a co-authorship network of a specific research field, and analyze this network by applying known statistical and network measures. However, our approach of analysis to co-authorship network is abstract, and is able to answer scientific queries regarding trend of evolutionary dynamics and proximity of collaborative efficiency of scientific collaborations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trend and efficiency analysis of co-authorship network

et al. 2011

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Although co-authorship in scientific research has a long history the analysis of co-authorship network to explore scientific collaboration among authors is a relatively new research area. Studies of current literature about co-authorship networks mostly give emphasis to understand patterns of scientific collaborations, to capture collaborative statistics, and to propose valid and reliable measures for identifying prominent author(s). However, there is no such study in the literature which conducts a longitudinal analysis of co-authorship networks. Using a dataset that spans over 20 years, this paper attempts to explore efficiency and trend of co-authorship networks. Two scientists are considered connected if they have co-authored a paper, and these types of connections between two scientists eventually constitute co-authorship networks. Co-authorship networks evolve among researchers over time in specific research domains as well as in interdisciplinary research areas. Scientists from diverse research areas and different geographical locations may participate in one specific co-authorship network whereas an individual scientist may belong to different co-authorship networks. In this paper, we study a longitudinal co-authorship network of a specific scientific research area. By applying approaches to

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“…Huang & Chang (2011) investigated the interdisciplinary changes in the IS field in the period by analyzing five information science journals.…”

Section: Society For Information Science and Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Detecting Research Trends in Korean Information Science Research, 2000-2011

Seo¹,

Yu²

2013

Journal of the Korean Society for information Management

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Even though the overall scholarly community has recognized a dramatic growth and changes in the Information Science research in Korea over the last few decades, there are still only few studies that have identified the changes in terms of long-term and dynamic point of view. We have analyzed 1,007 IS-research articles from leading Korean journals in KCI (Korea Citation Index), published between 2000 and 2011. To discern the trendline of changes in research interests over time, we conducted a time-series analysis by developing grounded subject scheme from the article set and checking the growth rate of the number of published articles and title keywords. A comparative analysis was also conducted by constructing and comparing co-word maps over time to discover visible changes in research topics over this 12-year period of the IS-research in Korea. As a result, we identified some developments and transformations in major subject areas and knowledge structure of the IS-research in Korea over time. The major trend we discovered is that IS-studies over the 12-year period evolved from system-oriented research to library-application research. The changes are especially observed in knowledge management, Web-based system evaluation, and information retrieval areas. When compared to the results of other studies, the result of our study may serve as an evidence of the localization of Korean IS-studies in the first decade of the 21 st century.

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A study of interdisciplinarity in information science: using direct citation and co-authorship analysis

Cited by 66 publications

References 17 publications

Who studies MOOCs? Interdisciplinarity in MOOC research and its changes over time

Who studies MOOCs? Interdisciplinarity in MOOC research and its changes over time

Trend and efficiency analysis of co-authorship network

Detecting Research Trends in Korean Information Science Research, 2000-2011

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