IDEAS: Interdisciplinary Dynamics in Emerging Areas of Science
In this project, I am working with Ryan Light (University of Oregon) to examine the characteristics of emerging research fields that fundamentally span across multiple disciplines. We draw on published research to examine the structures of coauthorship, citation and topical networks to identify patterns of cohesion and fragmentation within these fields. In combination, these analytic approaches allow us to identify patterns that contribute to (or inhibit) important scientific discoveries. Currently, this project has several inter-related aims.
- Formalize the theoretical linkage between interdisciplinary processes and boundary construction/maintenance within those fields.
- Describe the specific trajectories for a sample of problem-based fields that involve researchers from a variety of disciplines, as a way to fill out how that theoretical model operates in practice.
- Draw on that theoretical model to identify how actualized trajectories are selections from those possible routes as a more principled way to evaluate “successful” field-level integration.
This project started with a number of publications describing changes in the field of HIV/AIDS research over its first 20 years. Now, building on the methods developed in that case, and the theoretical framework it helped to spawn, we are also furthering the empirical scope of the project to include cases from research on COVID-19, demography, environmental studies/sciences, religion, population health, and neuroscience. This is evolving into a book project that we aim to have a completed draft of sometime in 2023, the beginnings of that argument are sketched out in this paper.
Early stages of this project were supported by a seed grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health and Society Scholars Program at Columbia University.
Related publications:
- jimi adams & Kate Vinita Fitch. 2023. “Whose Social Capital? Visualizing Citation \& Co-Citation Patterns of a Fragmented Concept.” Socius 9:. (code)
- jimi adams, Ryan Light, & Nicholas Theis (1st two authors contributed equally). 2020. “Mobilizing COVIID-19 Research.” Contexts 19(4): 36-41. (code)
- preliminary blog version: “What Role Does Collaboration across Disciplines have in Responding to COVID-19?’’ (preprint & code)
- Ryan Light & jimi adams. 2016. “Knowledge in Motion: The Evolution of HIV/AIDS Research.” Scientometrics 107(3): 1227-1248.
- Ryan Light & jimi adams. 2016. “A Dynamic, Multidimensional Approach to Knowledge Production.” Chapter 6 in Scott Frickel, Mathieu Albert & Barbara Prainsack (eds.) Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Theory & Practice Across the Disciplines. Rutgers University Press.
- jimi adams & Ryan Light. 2015. “Scientific Consensus, the Law, and Same Sex Parenting Outcomes.” Social Science Research 53: 300-310.
- jimi adams & Ryan Light. 2014. “Mapping Interdisciplinary Fields: Efficiencies, Gaps and Redundancies in HIV/AIDS Research.” PLoS One 9(12): e115092.