A First Step towards Measuring Interdisciplinary Engagement in Scientific Publications: A Case Study on NLP + CSS Research
Abstract
AbstractWith the rise in the prevalence of cross-disciplinary research, there is a need to develop methods to characterize its practices. Current computational methods to evaluate interdisciplinary engagement—such as affiliation diversity, keywords, and citation patterns—are insufficient to model the degree of engagement between disciplines, as well as the way in which the complementary expertise of co-authors is harnessed. In this paper, we propose an automated framework to address some of these issues on a large scale. Our framework tracks interdisciplinary citations in scientific articles and models: 1) the section and position in which they appear, and 2) the argumentative role that they play in the writing. To showcase our framework, we perform a preliminary analysis of interdisciplinary engagement in published work at the intersection of natural language processing and computational social science in the last decade.