Interdisciplinary Research in the Sciences: Implications for Library Organization
Date
1992-07
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Abstract
Accounts in both the popular media and scientific literature attest to the
increasingly interdisciplinary character of scientific research. The twentieth
century has seen the emergence· of problem-centered and mission-oriented
research in which discoveries and developments in one discipline are synthe sized into the research of a very different field, often with dramatic and
life-altering results. This paper uses techniques of citation analysis to examine
information use by scientists in a university chemistry department and offers
a measure of the interdisciplinarity of the research they publish. The chemists
whose published research was examined were found to make use of many
journals that class outside the discipline of chemistry; over 49 % of the journals
cited in a sample of their recent publications are classed in other disciplines.
This study will consider implications for university libraries attempting to
provide information services to scientists engaged in interdisciplinary research .