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2553 Authors’ perceptions of the interdisciplinarity of their research
- Christine M. Weston, Mia S. Terkowitz, Daniel E. Ford
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- Journal:
- Journal of Clinical and Translational Science / Volume 2 / Issue S1 / June 2018
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 21 November 2018, p. 5
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- Article
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OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: The objectives of this study were to compare different methods for determining the disciplines involved in a research article. We sought to address the following questions: To what extent does the number of disciplines reported by an article’s corresponding author agree with their description of the article as unidisciplinary or interdisciplinary? (Q1) and To what extent does the corresponding author’s description of the research as unidisciplinary or interdisciplinary agree with its classification as unidisciplinary or interdisciplinary based on the affiliation of its co-authors? (Q2). METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Using Scopus, we randomly selected 100 articles from 2010 and 2015 from science teams that had at least 1 author affiliated with Johns Hopkins. Author affiliations were grouped into common academic disciplines: Basic Science, Medicine (and all clinical specialties), Public Health, Engineering, Social Science, Computer Science, Pharmacy, Nursing, and Other. Articles with more than 1 discipline were considered, interdisciplinary. We then sent an online Qualtrics survey to the corresponding author of each article and asked them to indicate (1) all of the disciplines that contributed to the research article at hand, and (2) to indicate whether they considered the research to be “unidisciplinary” or “interdisciplinary” based on definitions that we provided. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: For Q1, we asked corresponding authors to indicate the number of disciplines involved in their research and then to choose the definition that best described their research. Among 76 respondents, 42 indicated that their research consisted of 1 discipline, and 34 indicated that their research consisted of more than 1 discipline. Of the 42 respondents who indicated that their research consisted of one discipline, 21 (50%) respondents described their research as “unidisciplinary” and 21 (50%) described their research as “interdisciplinary.” However, of the 34 respondents who indicated that their research consisted of more than 1 discipline, all but 1 (97%) described their research as “interdisciplinary.” For Q2, we assigned a discipline to each co-author based on his/her affiliation and counted the number of disciplines involved. Among 76 respondents, of the 22 who described their research as “unidisciplinary,” 16 (73%) were categorized as “unidisciplinary” and 6 (27%) were categorized as “interdisciplinary,” using this method. Of the 54 respondents who described their research as “interdisciplinary,” 30 (56%) were categorized as “interdisciplinary” and 24 (44%) as “unidisciplinary.” DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Our results highlight that different methods for determining whether a given research article is interdisciplinary are likely to yield different results. Even when researchers indicate that their research is based within one major discipline, they may still consider it interdisciplinary. Likewise, classifying an article as either unidisciplinary or interdisciplinary based on the affiliations of its co-authors, may not be consistent with the way it is viewed by its authors. It is important to acknowledge that assessing the interdisciplinarity of research is complex and that objective and subjective views may differ.
2494: Have interdisciplinary collaborations increased over the last 10 years at Johns Hopkins University? Results of a pilot study
- Christine M. Weston, Mia S. Terkowitz, Daniel E. Ford
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- Journal:
- Journal of Clinical and Translational Science / Volume 1 / Issue S1 / September 2017
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 10 May 2018, p. 51
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OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: The purpose of this study is to determine if the prevalence of interdisciplinary collaborations has increased over the past 10 years at 1 CTSA-funded institution. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We used Scopus to identify all articles published by authors affiliated with any of the Johns Hopkins Institutions for the years 2005, 2010, and 2015. We limited the search by the Scopus Field Codes “Subject Area” to biomedical science only, “Document Type” to articles only, and “Source Type” to journals only. We further eliminated all articles with 1 author or more than 10 authors. This resulted in 2800 articles for 2005, 3987 for 2010, and 4569 for 2015. After exporting the articles, we randomly selected 25 from each of the 3 time periods. Using the World Public Library Outline of Academic Disciplines as a guide, every author was assigned 1 of the following disciplines: Social Science (eg, Psychology), Basic Science (eg, Biology, Chemistry), Agriculture, Computer Science, Engineering, Medicine, Public Health, Nursing, or an Interdisciplinary field (eg, Genetic Medicine) based on their department and school affiliation. Articles with authors who belonged to 1 discipline only were considered single-discipline articles, and articles with authors in a least 2 different disciplines were considered “interdisciplinary.” RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Based on the results of an initial pilot study, in 2005, 24% of articles were interdisciplinary, in 2010, 20% of articles were interdisciplinary, and in 2015, 60% of articles were interdisciplinary. The large gap between the first 2 time periods (2005 and 2010) and the most recent (2015), suggests a possible pattern of increasing growth of interdisciplinary collaborations over time. Expanding this analysis to a much larger sample size will provide additional important evidence. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Increasing emphasis is being placed on evaluating the effectiveness of the CTSA consortium in achieving its goals and on developing methods to gauge its success. Systematic methods that are easy to replicate across hubs are needed to better understand and track the evolution of scientific collaborations over time. This study outlines a process for determining whether one of the major desirable outcomes of the CTSA, notably the growth of interdisciplinary collaborations, can be determined through the analysis of authorship patterns. Further research is needed to confirm the generalizability of these results across other CTSA hubs.
Contributors
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- By Lassi Alvesalo, Alberto Anta, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Shara E. Bailey, Priscilla Bayle, José María Bermúdez de Castro, Tracy K. Betsinger, Luca Bondioli, Scott E. Burnett, Concepcion de la Rúa, William N. Duncan, Ryan M. Durner, Heather J.H. Edgar, Scott M. Fitzpatrick, Michael R. Fong, Ana Gracia-Téllez, Theresa M. Grieco, Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, Tsunehiko Hanihara, Brian E. Hemphill, Leslea J. Hlusko, Michael W. Holmes, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Toby E. Hughes, John P. Hunter, Joel D. Irish, Kent M. Johnson, Sri Kuswandari, Christine Lee, John R. Lukacs, Roberto Macchiarelli, Laura Martín-Francés, Ignacio Martínez, María Martinón-Torres, Arnaud Mazurier, Yuji Mizoguchi, Stephanie Moormann, Greg C. Nelson, Stephen D. Ousley, Oliver T. Rizk, G. Richard Scott, Roman Schomberg, Kes Schroer, Christopher M. Stojanowski, Grant C. Townsend, Christy G. Turner, Theresia C. Weston, Bernard Wood, Clément Zanolli, Linhu Zhang
- Edited by G. Richard Scott, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Joel D. Irish, Liverpool John Moores University
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- Book:
- Anthropological Perspectives on Tooth Morphology
- Published online:
- 05 March 2013
- Print publication:
- 21 February 2013, pp viii-xi
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