title: The Interdisciplinarity of Collaborations in Cognitive Science.
abstract: We introduce a new metric for interdisciplinarity, based on co-author publication history. A published article that has co-authors with quite different publication histories can be deemed relatively "interdisciplinary," in that the article reflects a convergence of previous research in distinct sets of publication outlets. In recent work, we have shown that this interdisciplinarity metric can predict citations. Here, we show that the journal Cognitive Science tends to contain collaborations that are relatively high on this interdisciplinarity metric, at about the 80th percentile of all journals across both social and natural sciences. Following on Goldstone and Leydesdorff (2006), we describe how scientometric tools provide a valuable means of assessing the role of cognitive science in broader scientific work, and also as a tool to investigate teamwork and distributed cognition. We describe how data-driven metrics of this kind may facilitate this exploration without relying upon rapidly changing discipline and topic keywords associated with publications.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced.
authors.forename: Till
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bergmann
authors.affiliation: Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced.
authors.forename: Rick
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Dale
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside.
authors.forename: Negin
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Sattari
authors.affiliation: Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced.
authors.forename: Evan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Heit
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Mathematics, University of California, Merced.
authors.forename: Harish S
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Bhat
mesh_terms: D019336:Cognitive Science; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D006801:Humans; D058025:Interdisciplinary Studies
keywords: Big data; Interdisciplinarity; Jensen-Shannon divergence; Publication history; Scientometrics