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A hierarchical approach to analyzing knowledge integration between two fields—a case study on medical informatics and computer science

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Abstract

As a driver in modern science, interdisciplinary research has attracted a lot of attention. Major foci are laid on exploring the relations of multiple involved disciplines as well as the knowledge structure in interdisciplinary field. However, there is still a lack of decomposing the knowledge structure of interdisciplinary field to investigate how knowledge from relevant disciplines is integrated in the field. This study proposes an approach to investigating knowledge integration relationships between two research fields from a perspective of hierarchy. Medical Informatics (MI) and its most relevant field of Computer Science (CS) are chosen in the case study. This study decomposed each keyword network of the two fields into four layers by using the K-core method, then quantified the knowledge integration relationships between different layers of the two fields together. The results present that the MI basic layer shows the strongest knowledge integration with CS, followed by the middle layer, with the detail layer the weakest. And all MI layers have the greatest breadth and strength of knowledge integration with the CS middle layer, followed by the CS marginal layer and detail layer, but with the CS basic layer the weakest. A time series analysis shows that the integration of new CS knowledge into MI is a gradual process without explosive growth and the path of knowledge integration between the two fields were identified. The proposed approach could be applied to deeply understanding the integration of one discipline knowledge by an interdisciplinary field.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that the CS discipline defined by the 30 journals is a small subset of artificial intelligence field in computer science. Other fields of computer science are not covered, such as cybernetics, hardware, software engineering, etc.

  2. https://shiyun-w.github.io/MI-layer/.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71790612 and 71804135). We gratefully thank Dr. Zhe He in the School of Information at the Florida State University to help label the discipline information of the selected terms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Zhichao Ba & Yujie Cao

  2. Center for Studies of Information Resources, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Jin Mao & Gang Li

Authors
  1. Zhichao Ba
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  2. Yujie Cao
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  3. Jin Mao
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  4. Gang Li
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Yujie Cao or Jin Mao.

Appendices

Appendix A

See Table 8.

Table 8 Journal list in “Medical Informatics” subject category in WoS
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Appendix B

See Table 9.

Table 9 The list of 30 Computer Science journals
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Appendix C

See Table 10.

Table 10 The distribution of 105 CS terms in CS network and their integration by MI
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Ba, Z., Cao, Y., Mao, J. et al. A hierarchical approach to analyzing knowledge integration between two fields—a case study on medical informatics and computer science. Scientometrics 119, 1455–1486 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03103-1

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Keywords

Mathematics Subject Classification

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