Interdisciplinary Research in the Sciences: Implications for Library Organization

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 synthesized 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 .