摘要
Interdisciplinary research(IDR)plays a vital role in tackling grand and complex challenges such as COVID-19,which has severe consequences for public health,economy,politics,and society.This study compares several facets of interdisciplinarity that occurred in the research relating to two serious global pandemics in this century,namely SARS and COVID-19,and provides a comprehensive summary of the performance and growth of pandemic-related interdisciplinary research.Generally,the scientific community gathers more multidisciplinary efforts to tackle COVID-19 in comparison to SARS.Firstly,COVID-19 related research from each major field has greater connections with their established expertise and research threads such that they are studying the impact of COVID-19 on their own existing research subjects,while the studies of SARS by different disciplines exhibit less discernable disciplinary characteristics.Secondly,as for the interdisciplinarity observed in the knowledge base of pandemic-related publications,we observe a greater presence of social science knowledge and a more dispersed distribution of knowledge from various disciplines comparing publications on COVID-19 with SARS.Thirdly,regarding interdisciplinarity in research collaboration,COVID-19 publications are on average produced by more interdisciplinary teams than SARS,as measured by the number and diversity of affiliated disciplines of authors.Our discovery on the growth of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in pandemic-related research signals positive achievement that the scientific community is responding to such a global challenge as a whole and is willing to break down existing disciplinary silos to facilitate the flow of knowledge and breed novelty.
基金
funded by the China Scholarship Council(CSC)from the Ministry of Education of China
funding from the Flemish Government through its support to the Centre for R&D Monitoring(ECOOM)
support from the National Laboratory Centre for Library and Information Science at Wuhan University
