Using doctoral dissertations for a new understanding of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity

摘要

This paper displays a preliminary result of studyingdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity based on a new sourceof data: doctoral dissertations. By looking into the doctoraldissertations across more than a century, this paper aims toreport the overall development of disciplines and theinteraction among disciplines. Preliminary resultsdemonstrate significant increases in the number ofdisciplines across the 20th century and the level ofinteraction among disciplines. This poster focuses on the 30highest producing disciplines and examines the dependencyof these disciplines on other disciplines (where dependencyis measured by the proportion of dissertations within thatdiscipline that are also labeled with another discipline). Thedata reveals that science disciplines (e.g., mathematics,chemistry, and physics) bare fewer interdisciplinaryfeatures than social science and humanities disciplines andthat many contemporary social science and humanitiesdisciplines (e.g., black studies and women’s studies) arehighly dependent. The implications of these preliminaryfindings and the areas of further investigation using thisdataset are proposed.