• “Keywords: Scientific trading, Knowledge export, Knowledge import, Disciplinary”

How do ideas move from one group of people to another? A recent article looks at trading as a metaphor for the exchange of ideas among scholars. The work, published in the April 2013 issue of the Journal of Informetrics was conducted by SLIS doctoral student, Erjia Yan, SLIS faculty members Ying Ding and Blaise Cronin, and Loet Leydesdorff from the University of Amsterdam. The full-text article is available through Elsevier’s Science Direct. The abstract is included below.

• Yan, E., Ding, Y., Cronin, B. and Leydesdorff, L. (2013). A bird’s-eye view of scientific trading: Dependency relations among fields of science. Journal of Informetrics 7(2), 249-264.

Abstract:
We use a trading metaphor to study knowledge transfer in the sciences as well as the social sciences. The metaphor comprises four dimensions: (a) Discipline Self-dependence, (b) Knowledge Exports/Imports, (c) Scientific Trading Dynamics, and (d) Scientific Trading Impact. This framework is applied to a dataset of 221 Web of Science subject categories. We find that: (i) the Scientific Trading Impact and Dynamics of materials science and transportation science have increased; (ii) biomedical disciplines, physics, and mathematics are significant knowledge exporters, as is statistics and probability; (iii) in the social sciences, economics, business, psychology, management, and sociology are important knowledge exporters; and (iv) Discipline Self-dependence is associated with specialized domains which have ties to professional practice (e.g., law, ophthalmology, dentistry, oral surgery and medicine, psychology, psychoanalysis, veterinary sciences, and nursing).

Posted February 07, 2013