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Neuroscience bridging scientific disciplines in health: Who builds the bridge, who pays for it?

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Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the dynamics of cross-disciplinary research in health-related fields as affected by individual and institutional factors. We examine the topics of more than 500,000 doctoral dissertations from U.S. institutions in six major disciplines in 1996–2014. We find that (1) the overall extent of cross-disciplinary studies has remained steady over the years, while there is an increasing trend of cross-disciplinary research between biological sciences and engineering, as well as biological sciences and behavioral sciences, especially in recent years; and (2) at the subject level, the cross-disciplinary research around neuroscience is rapidly increasing, and neuroscience is becoming one of the most important bridges across subjects in various disciplines. A further investigation shows that the tendency to conduct cross-disciplinary neuroscience research is driven by an institutional trend that occurs across various departments, and there is an association between lagged neuroscience funding input and the production of cross-disciplinary neuroscience dissertations. Overall, our results offer new insights into the dynamic nature of cross-disciplinary research in health, the role of topics as bridging different disciplines, and human and funding capital in building the bridges.

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Source: Authors’ estimation from the ProQuest dissertation dataset

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Notes

  1. http://corpweb.proquest.com/assets/etd/umi_subjectcategoriesguide.pdf.

  2. We could not directly collect authors’ department affiliations for the most of the time because it is difficult to find their CVs. So instead we collect authors’ advisors’ department affiliation in formation and use those as proxies for authors’ department affiliations during their Ph.D. study. If advisors have multiple affiliations we use their primary affiliations.

  3. We define a grant to be neuroscience related if (1) the funding institute is National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) or (2) the study section is neuroscience related. That is, if the study section involves anyone of the following: BNVT, BINP, CDIN, CMND, CNBT, CNN, CNNT, LAM, MNG, MNPS, NAL, NAED, NAME, NCF, NDPR, NMB, NNRS, NOIT, NTRC, DBD, IFCN, MDCN, BDCN, ANIE, BPNS, NOMD, NPAS, SPC.

  4. Clinical psychology has the largest number of cross-disciplinary dissertations in 2012–2014 (2021 dissertations).

  5. We observe a modest dip in number of dissertations tagged with both neuroscience and cognitive psychology in 2010. However, we do not observe such fluctuation from the topic modeling results. We suspect it is likely due to some inconsistencies in subject category coding (e.g. hiring and training new editors) in ProQuest around 2010.

  6. Within university variation of conducting cross-disciplinary neuroscience research has been steady over years.

  7. Our results are slightly different from other studies showing interdisciplinarity between fields has modestly increased over years (Porter and Rafols 2009; Larivière and Gingras 2014). Differences are possibly due to different samples (dissertations vs. published studies), time frames (1996–2014 vs. 1980s to early 2000s) and measures of interdisciplinarity (measures based on subject categories vs. bibliometric data). However, consistent with the previous literature, our results show that the overall structure of science map remains steady and interdisciplinarity between distant fields has not increased.

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Acknowledgements

The National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Grant 2U01GM094141-05), and the Institute for Society, Culture and Environment of Virginia Tech supported this work. We thank Keyvan Vakili (London Business School) and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and the ProQuest dissertation data team for generously sharing the dissertation metadata.

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  1. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Virginia Tech, Falls Church, VA, USA

    Ran Xu & Navid Ghaffarzadegan

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  1. Ran Xu
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Correspondence to Ran Xu.

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Xu, R., Ghaffarzadegan, N. Neuroscience bridging scientific disciplines in health: Who builds the bridge, who pays for it?. Scientometrics 117, 1183–1204 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2887-3

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