Bellotti Elisa, Kronegger Luka, Guadalupi Luigi
Department of Sociology, Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK.
Faculty of Social Sciences, Centre for Methodology and Informatics, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Scientometrics. 2016;109(2):783-811. doi: 10.1007/s11192-016-2068-1. Epub 2016 Jul 15.
In sociology of science much attention is dedicated to the study of scientific networks, especially to co-authorship and citations in publications. Other trends of research have investigated the advantages, limits, performances and difficulties of interdisciplinary research, which is increasingly advocated by the main lines of public research funding. This paper explores the dynamics of interdisciplinary research in Italy over 10 years of scientific collaboration on research projects. Instead of looking at the output of research, i.e. publications, we analyse the original research proposals that have been funded by the Ministry of University and Research for a specific line of funding, the Research Projects of National Interest. In particular, we want to see how much interdisciplinary research has been conducted during the period under analysis and how changes in the overall amount of public funding might have affected disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration. We also want to cluster the similarities and differences of the amount of disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration across scientific disciplines, and see if it changes over time. Finally, we want to see if interdisciplinary projects receive an increasing share of funding compared to their disciplinary bounded counterparts. Our results indicate that while interdisciplinary research diminishes along the years, potentially responding to the contraction of public funding, research that cut across disciplinary boundaries overall receives more funding than research confined within disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, the clustering procedure do not indicate clear and stable distinction between disciplines, but similar patterns of disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration are shown by discipline with common epistemological frameworks, which share compatible epistemologies of scientific investigations. We conclude by reflecting upon the implications of our findings for research policies and practices and by discussing future research in this area.
在科学社会学中，很多注意力都集中在科学网络的研究上，尤其是出版物中的共同作者关系和引用情况。其他研究趋势则探讨了跨学科研究的优势、局限性、表现和困难，而跨学科研究越来越受到公共研究资助主要方向的倡导。本文探讨了意大利在10年研究项目科学合作中跨学科研究的动态。我们不是着眼于研究产出，即出版物，而是分析由大学和研究部为特定资助方向“国家利益研究项目”资助的原始研究提案。具体而言，我们想了解在分析期内进行了多少跨学科研究，以及公共资金总量的变化可能如何影响学科内和跨学科合作。我们还想对各学科间学科内和跨学科合作数量的异同进行聚类分析，并观察其是否随时间变化。最后，我们想看看与学科界限明确的项目相比，跨学科项目获得的资金份额是否在增加。我们的结果表明，虽然跨学科研究多年来有所减少，这可能是对公共资金收缩的回应，但总体而言，跨越学科界限的研究比局限于学科界限内的研究获得更多资金。此外，聚类分析并未表明各学科之间有清晰稳定的区别，但具有共同认识论框架、共享兼容科学调查认识论的学科显示出相似的学科内和跨学科合作模式。我们通过思考研究结果对研究政策和实践的影响以及讨论该领域未来的研究来得出结论。
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