Quantifying Interdisciplinarity in Cognitive Science and Beyond.

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.