Abstract
Some science and technology policies promote collaboration between natural sciences (NS) and social sciences and humanities (SSH) on research topics related to complex societal issues such as climate change. However, there is a lack of empirical research on how and why a discipline uses knowledge from the same or another discipline. This study employs citation context analysis to explore the characteristics of citation behavior between NS and SSH. Specifically, focusing on climate change (SDG 13) and renewable energy (SDG 7), we classified related papers as either NS or SSH. Further, we analyzed how citation behavior differs by patterns of citations between disciplines, such as NS citing NS and NS citing SSH. The findings show that the sections where citations are more likely to be made or the citation purposes significantly differ by each pattern in each topic. In addition, it was common across both topics that NS tended to cite SSH frequently in the methodology section. While a typical collaboration pattern between NS and SSH is assumed as NS contributes methodologically to the solution of SSH research questions, the findings suggest that SSH contributes methodologically to NS. This study sheds new light on the exploration of knowledge flows between disciplines.
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12 April 2023
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04701-w
Notes
Since the citation pair relationship is a category related to social capital and further interpretation of the results of this analysis would require data and analytical methods beyond the scope of this study (Zhang et al., 2013), it was not focused on in the Discussion section.
The overlap rate of citing papers is 5.54% and 5.62% for SDG 7 and SDG 13, respectively, and the overlap rate of cited papers is 5.62% and 7.55% for SDG 7 and SDG 13, respectively.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people for their comments and suggestions on this study: Dr. Yuji Matsumoto, Dr. Noriki Nishida, and Dr. Hiroki Teranishi, who belong to the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, Dr. Akiko Aizawa, National Institute of Informatics, and Dr. Junichiro Mori, University of Tokyo. I also extend my gratitude to Dr. Hitoshi Koshiba and Dr. Masatsura Igami, who belong to the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP), for providing valuable advice and attentive support, and Ms. Mie Monjiyama, who worked alongside me during this research project as a research assistant from the Tokyo University of Science.
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Nishikawa, K. How and why are citations between disciplines made? A citation context analysis focusing on natural sciences and social sciences and humanities. Scientometrics 128, 2975–2997 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04664-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04664-y