Waltman Ludo, van Raan Anthony F J, Smart Sue
Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Swindon, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2014 Oct 31;9(10):e111530. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0111530. eCollection 2014.
We investigate the extent to which advances in the health and life sciences (HLS) are dependent on research in the engineering and physical sciences (EPS), particularly physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. The analysis combines two different bibliometric approaches. The first approach to analyze the 'EPS-HLS interface' is based on term map visualizations of HLS research fields. We consider 16 clinical fields and five life science fields. On the basis of expert judgment, EPS research in these fields is studied by identifying EPS-related terms in the term maps. In the second approach, a large-scale citation-based network analysis is applied to publications from all fields of science. We work with about 22,000 clusters of publications, each representing a topic in the scientific literature. Citation relations are used to identify topics at the EPS-HLS interface. The two approaches complement each other. The advantages of working with textual data compensate for the limitations of working with citation relations and the other way around. An important advantage of working with textual data is in the in-depth qualitative insights it provides. Working with citation relations, on the other hand, yields many relevant quantitative statistics. We find that EPS research contributes to HLS developments mainly in the following five ways: new materials and their properties; chemical methods for analysis and molecular synthesis; imaging of parts of the body as well as of biomaterial surfaces; medical engineering mainly related to imaging, radiation therapy, signal processing technology, and other medical instrumentation; mathematical and statistical methods for data analysis. In our analysis, about 10% of all EPS and HLS publications are classified as being at the EPS-HLS interface. This percentage has remained more or less constant during the past decade.
我们研究了健康与生命科学（HLS）的进展在多大程度上依赖于工程与物理科学（EPS），特别是物理学、化学、数学和工程学方面的研究。该分析结合了两种不同的文献计量方法。第一种分析“EPS - HLS界面”的方法基于HLS研究领域的术语地图可视化。我们考虑了16个临床领域和5个生命科学领域。基于专家判断，通过在术语地图中识别与EPS相关的术语来研究这些领域中的EPS研究。在第二种方法中，对来自所有科学领域的出版物进行大规模的基于引用的网络分析。我们处理约22,000个出版物集群，每个集群代表科学文献中的一个主题。引用关系用于识别EPS - HLS界面的主题。这两种方法相互补充。处理文本数据的优势弥补了处理引用关系的局限性，反之亦然。处理文本数据的一个重要优势在于它提供的深入定性见解。另一方面，处理引用关系会产生许多相关的定量统计数据。我们发现EPS研究主要通过以下五种方式促进HLS的发展：新材料及其特性；分析和分子合成的化学方法；身体部位以及生物材料表面的成像；主要与成像、放射治疗、信号处理技术和其他医疗仪器相关的医学工程；用于数据分析的数学和统计方法。在我们的分析中，所有EPS和HLS出版物中约有10%被归类为处于EPS - HLS界面。在过去十年中，这一百分比大致保持不变。
