Recently, Feicheng Ma’s research group published an online article Exploring the critical years for interdisciplinary citations in Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology (JASIST). Guoyang Rong, a 2023-grade doctoral student of our School, is the first author. His tutor is Professor Feicheng Ma.

Revealing interdisciplinary patterns is a cornerstone for the continued evolution of research, education, and societal progress, providing a scaffold upon which to build a more collaborative and integrated approach to knowledge creation. This study presents a novel approach to identifying and analyzing the critical year for interdisciplinary citations (CYIC), which was defined as the year in which qualitative change in interdisciplinary knowledge flow occurred. Professor Feicheng Ma’s research group conducted two experiments using a Chinese paper dataset spanning 106 disciplines from 1992 to 2022, with the first to pinpoint the occurrence of CYICs and the second to examine three patterns of interdisciplinarity following these CYICs. Their findings revealed that 85% of disciplines exhibit CYICs, often corresponding with a transition from unidirectional output to reciprocal knowledge cooperation. Furthermore, they found that datasets after CYICs are generally characterized by increased interdisciplinarity of knowledge, albeit without a corresponding rise in the interdisciplinarity of disciplines or interdisciplinary diversity. Their results suggest that policy shifts and societal needs are pivotal in driving the formation of interdisciplinary collaborations, as exemplified by the surge in mutual interdisciplinary citations in response to China's poverty alleviation efforts and western development policies.

Link to the full article: http://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24940