2022/03/28 by Pablo Contreras Kallens, Rick Dale, Morten H. Christiansen · 1 voice
Decision Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #scientometrics and bibliometrics research #Interdisciplinary Research and Collaboration #Philosophy and History of Science
paper · doi:10.1111/tops.12609
openalex publication_date 2022/03/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recent publications have lamented the dominance of psychology in cognitive science. However, this relies on a limited definition of collaboration between fields. We call for a renewed conception of interdisciplinarity as a "mixture of expertise." We describe an information-theoretic measure of interdisciplinarity and apply it to multiauthored published articles. Results suggest that cognitive science journals mix expertise more than topically related journals. We suggest that perceptions of diminishing interdisciplinarity may in part be due to the emergence of different theoretical perspectives and use a semantic model to illustrate this argument. We conclude by describing some benefits of this broader conception.