Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
Université de Montréal, École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information in Montréal, Québec Canada, Canada.
Perspect Med Educ. 2023 Aug 22;12(1):327-337. doi: 10.5334/pme.984. eCollection 2023.
Interdisciplinary research, which integrates input (e.g., data, techniques, theories) from two or more disciplines, is critical for solving wicked problems. Medical education research is assumed to be interdisciplinary. However, researchers have questioned this assumption. The present study, a conceptual replication, clarifies the nature of medical education interdisciplinarity by analyzing the citations of medical education journal articles.
The authors retrieved the cited references of all articles in 22 medical education journals between 2001-2020 from Web of Science (WoS). We then identified the WoS classifications for the journals of each cited reference.
We analyzed 31,283 articles referencing 723,683 publications. We identified 493,973 (68.3%) of those cited references in 6,618 journals representing 242 categories, which represents 94% of all WoS categories. Close to half of all citations were categorized as "education, scientific disciplines" and "healthcare sciences and services". Over the study period, the number of references consistently increased as did the representation of categories to include a diversity of topics such as business, management, and linguistics.
Our study aligns with previous research, suggesting that medical education research could be described as inwardly focused. However, the observed growth of categories and their increasing diversity over time indicates that medical education displays increasing interdisciplinarity. Now visible, the field can raise awareness of and promote interdisciplinarity, if desired, by seeking and highlighting opportunities for future growth.
跨学科研究将来自两个或多个学科的输入（例如数据、技术、理论）整合在一起，对于解决棘手问题至关重要。医学教育研究被认为是跨学科的。然而，研究人员对此假设提出了质疑。本研究是对该假设的概念复制，通过分析医学教育期刊文章的引文，阐明了医学教育跨学科性的本质。
作者从 Web of Science（WoS）中检索了 2001-2020 年间 22 种医学教育期刊中所有文章的被引参考文献。然后，作者确定了每篇被引参考文献所属的 WoS 期刊分类。
我们分析了 31283 篇文章，这些文章引用了 723683 篇出版物。我们在 6618 种期刊中识别出 493973 篇（占 68.3%）被引参考文献，这些期刊代表了 242 个类别，占所有 WoS 类别的 94%。近一半的引文被归类为“教育、科学学科”和“医疗保健科学与服务”。在研究期间，参考文献的数量持续增加，涵盖的类别也越来越多，包括商业、管理和语言学等各种主题。
我们的研究与先前的研究一致，表明医学教育研究可以被描述为内向型。然而，观察到的类别数量的增长及其随时间的增加多样性表明，医学教育的跨学科性正在增强。现在可以看到，如果有需要，该领域可以通过寻找和强调未来增长的机会来提高对跨学科性的认识并促进跨学科性。
