Academic fields Plan: Academic fields

Main article: Multidisciplinary approach

Multidisciplinary knowledge is associated with more than one existing academic discipline or profession.

A multidisciplinary community or project is made up of people from different academic disciplines and professions. These people are engaged in working together as equal stakeholders in addressing a common challenge. A multidisciplinary person is one with degrees from two or more academic disciplines. This one person can take the place of two or more people in a multidisciplinary community. Over time, multidisciplinary work does not typically lead to an increase or a decrease in the number of academic disciplines. One key question is how well the challenge can be decomposed into subparts, and then addressed via the distributed knowledge in the community. The lack of shared vocabulary between people and communication overhead can sometimes be an issue in these communities and projects. If challenges of a particular type need to be repeatedly addressed so that each one can be properly decomposed, a multidisciplinary community can be exceptionally efficient and effective.^{[citation needed]}

There are many examples of a particular idea appearing in different academic disciplines, all of which came about around the same time. One example of this scenario is the shift from the approach of focusing on sensory awareness of the whole, "an attention to the 'total field'", a "sense of the whole pattern, of form and function as a unity", an "integral idea of structure and configuration". This has happened in art (in the form of cubism), physics, poetry, communication and educational theory. According to Marshall McLuhan, this paradigm shift was due to the passage from the era of mechanization, which brought sequentiality, to the era of the instant speed of electricity, which brought simultaneity.^[8]

Multidisciplinary approaches also encourage people to help shape the innovation of the future. The political dimensions of forming new multidisciplinary partnerships to solve the so-called societal Grand Challenges were presented in the Innovation Union and in the European Framework Programme, the Horizon 2020 operational overlay. Innovation across academic disciplines is considered the pivotal foresight of the creation of new products, systems, and processes for the benefit of all societies' growth and wellbeing. Regional examples such as Biopeople and industry-academia initiatives in translational medicine such as SHARE.ku.dk in Denmark provides the evidence of the successful endeavour of multidisciplinary innovation and facilitation of the paradigm shift.^{[citation needed]}

Transdisciplinary[]

Main article: Transdisciplinarity

In practice, transdisciplinary can be thought of as the union of all interdisciplinary efforts. While interdisciplinary teams may be creating new knowledge that lies between several existing disciplines, a transdisciplinary team is more holistic and seeks to relate all disciplines into a coherent whole.

Cross-disciplinary[]

Cross-disciplinary knowledge is that which explains aspects of one discipline in terms of another. Common examples of cross-disciplinary approaches are studies of the physics of music or the politicsof literature.

Bibliometric studies of disciplines[]

Bibliometrics can be used to map several issues in relation to disciplines, for example the flow of ideas within and among disciplines (Lindholm-Romantschuk, 1998)^[9] or the existence of specific national traditions within disciplines.^[10] Scholarly impact and influence of one discipline on another may be understood by analyzing the flow of citations.^[11]

The Bibliometrics approach is described as straightforward because it is based on simple counting. The method is also objective but the quantitative method may not be compatible with a qualitative assessment and therefore manipulated. The number of citations is dependent on the number of persons working in the same domain instead of inherent quality or published result's originality.^[12]

See also[]

• 
  Outline of academic disciplines
  
• 
  List of academic fields
  

References[]

1. 
   ^ Gibbons, Michael; Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, & Martin Trow (1994). The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage.
   
2. 
   ^ Ziman, John (2000). Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
   
3. 
   ^ History of Education, Encyclopædia Britannica (1977, 15th ion), Macropaedia Volume 6, p. 337
   
4. 
   ^ Jacques Revel (2003). "History and the Social Sciences". In Porter, Theodore; Ross, Dorothy (eds.). Cambridge History of Science: The Modern Social Sciences, Vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 391–404. ISBN 0521594421.
   
5. 
   ^ "How The Word 'Scientist' Came To Be". npr.org. National Public Radio. Retrieved November 3, 2014.
   
6. 
   ^ Cohen, E; Lloyd, S. "Disciplinary Evolution and the Rise of Transdiscipline" (PDF). Informing Science: the International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline.
   
7. 
   ^ Foucault, Michel (1977). Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. (Translation of: Surveiller et punir; naissance de la prison. [Paris] : Gallimard, 1975).
   
8. 
   ^ "McLuhan: Understanding Media". Understanding Media. 1964. p. 13. Archived from the original on December 8, 2008.
   
9. 
   ^ Lindholm-Romantschuk, Y. (1998). Scholarly book reviewing in the social sciences and humanities. The flow of ideas within and among disciplines. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
   
10. 
    ^ Ohlsson, H. (1999). Is there a Scandinavian psychology? A bibliometric note on the publication profiles of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 40, 235–39.
    
11. 
    ^ Serenko, A. & Bontis, N. (2013). The intellectual core and impact of the knowledge management academic discipline. Journal of Knowledge Management, 17(1), 137–55.
    
12. 
    ^ "Bibliometrics | The Guidelines project". www.guidelines.kaowarsom.be. Retrieved July 5, 2018.
    

Further reading[]

• 
  Abbott, A. (1988). The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-00069-5
  
• 
  Augsburg, T. (2005), Becoming Interdisciplinary: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies.
  
• 
  Dogan, M. & Pahre, R. (1990). "The fate of formal disciplines: from coherence to dispersion." In Creative Marginality: Innovation at the Intersections of Social Sciences. Boulder, CO: Westview. pp. 85–113.
  
• 
  Dullemeijer, P. (1980). "Dividing biology into disciplines: Chaos or multiformity?" Journal Acta Biotheoretica, 29(2), 87–93.
  
• 
  Fagin, R.; Halpern, J.Y.; Moses, Y. & Vardi, M.Y. (1995). Reasoning about Knowledge, MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-56200-6
  
• 
  Gibbons, M.; Limoges, C.; Nowotny, H.; Schwartzman, S.; Scott, P. & Trow, M. (1994). The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage.
  
• 
  Golinski, J. (1998/2005). Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivis, and the History of Science. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 2: "Identity and discipline." Part II: The Disciplinary Mold. pp. 66–78.
  
• 
  Hicks, D. (2004). "The Four Literatures of Social Science". IN: Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research: The Use of Publication and Patent Statistics in Studies of S&T Systems. Ed. Henk Moed. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
  
• 
  Hyland, K. (2004). Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. New ion. University of Michigan Press/ESL.
  
• 
  Klein, J.T. (1990). Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
  
• 
  Krishnan, Armin (January 2009), What are Academic Disciplines? Some observations on the Disciplinarity vs. Interdisciplinarity debate (PDF), NCRM Working Paper Series, Southampton: ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, retrieved September 10, 2017
  
• 
  Leydesdorff, L. & Rafols, I. (2008). A global map of science based on the ISI subject categories. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
  
• 
  Lindholm-Romantschuk, Y. (1998). Scholarly Book Reviewing in the Social Sciences and Humanities: The Flow of Ideas within and among Disciplines. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
  
• 
  Martin, B. (1998). Information Liberation: Challenging the Corruptions of Information Power. London: Freedom Press
  
• 
  Morillo, F.; Bordons, M. & Gomez, I. (2001). "An approach to interdisciplinarity bibliometric indicators." Scientometrics, 51(1), 203–22.
  
• 
  Morillo, F.; Bordons, M. & Gomez, I. (2003). "Interdisciplinarity in science: A tentative typology of disciplines and research areas". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54(13), 1237–49.
  
• 
  Newell, A. (1983). "Reflections on the structure of an interdiscipline." In Machlup, F. & U. Mansfield (Eds.), The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages. pp. 99–110. NY: John Wiley & Sons.
  
• 
  Pierce, S.J. (1991). "Subject areas, disciplines and the concept of authority". Library and Information Science Research, 13, 21–35.
  
• 
  Porter, A.L.; Roessner, J.D.; Cohen, A.S. & Perreault, M. (2006). "Interdisciplinary research: meaning, metrics and nurture." Research Evaluation, 15(3), 187–95.
  
• 
  Prior, P. (1998). Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy. Lawrence Erlbaum. (Rhetoric, Knowledge and Society Series)
  
• 
  Qin, J.; Lancaster, F.W. & Allen, B. (1997). "Types and levels of collaboration in interdisciplinary research in the sciences." Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(10), 893–916.
  
• 
  Rinia, E.J.; van Leeuwen, T.N.; Bruins, E.E.W.; van Vuren, H.G. & van Raan, A.F.J. (2002). "Measuring knowledge transfer between fields of science." Scientometrics, 54(3), 347–62.
  
• 
  Sanz-Menendez, L.; Bordons, M. & Zulueta, M. A. (2001). "Interdisciplinarity as a multidimensional concept: its measure in three different research areas." Research Evaluation, 10(1), 47–58.
  
• 
  Stichweh, R. (2001). "Scientific Disciplines, History of". Smelser, N.J. & Baltes, P.B. (eds.). International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford: Elsevier Science. pp. 13727–31.
  
• 
  Szostak, R. (October 2000). Superdisciplinarity: A Simple Definition of Interdisciplinarity With Profound Implications. Association for Integrative Studies, Portland, Oregon. (Meeting presentation)
  
• 
  Tengström, E. (1993). Biblioteks- och informationsvetenskapen – ett fler- eller tvärvetenskapligt område? Svensk Biblioteksforskning (1), 9–20.
  
• 
  Tomov, D.T. & Mutafov, H.G. (1996). "Comparative indicators of interdisciplinarity in modern science." Scientometrics, 37(2), 267–78.
  
• 
  van Leeuwen, T.N. & Tijssen, R.J.W. (1993). "Assessing multidisciplinary areas of science and technology – A synthetic bibliometric study of Dutch nuclear-energy research." Scientometrics, 26(1), 115–33.
  
• 
  van Leeuwen, T.N. & Tijssen, R.J.W. (2000). "Interdisciplinary dynamics of modern science: analysis of cross-disciplinary citation flows." Research Evaluation, 9(3), 183–87.
  
• 
  Weisgerber, D.W. (1993). "Interdisciplinary searching – problems and suggested remedies – A Report from the ICSTI Group on Interdisciplinary Searching." Journal of Documentation, 49(3), 231–54.
  
• 
  Wittrock, B. (2001). "Disciplines, History of, in the Social Sciences." International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, pp. 3721–28. Smeltser, N.J. & Baltes, P.B. (eds.). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
  

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