2025/09/29 by Anbang Du, Du, Anbang, Michael Head +3
Decision Sciences · Medicine · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Health and Medical Research Impacts #Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph) #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.24994
openalex publication_date 2025/09/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/02
Interdisciplinary research is critical for innovation and addressing complex societal issues. We characterise the interdisciplinary knowledge structure of PubMed research articles in medicine as correlation networks of medical concepts and compare the interdisciplinarity of articles between high-ranking (impactful) and less high-ranking (less impactful) medical journals. We found that impactful medical journals tend to publish research that are less interdisciplinary than less impactful journals. Observing that they bridge distant knowledge clusters in the networks, we find that cancer-related research can be seen as one of the main drivers of interdisciplinarity in medical science. Using signed difference networks, we also investigate the clustering of deviations between high and low impact journal correlation networks. We generally find a mild tendency for strong link differences to be adjacent. Furthermore, we find topic clusters of deviations that shift over time. In contrast, topic clusters in the original networks are static over time and can be seen as the core knowledge structure in medicine. Overall, journals and policymakers should encourage initiatives to accommodate interdisciplinarity within the existing infrastructures to maximise the potential patient benefits from IDR.