Maps of science as interdisciplinary discourse: co-citing contexts and the role of analogy

Assumptions about interdisciplinarity: • Interdisciplinarity can be manifest in many forms: through collaboration or communication between scientists in different fields, or through the work of individuals who employ concepts in different fields, or span fields. • We will address the latter form, and try to understand how ideas in different fields can come together using the techniques of science mapping and co-citation context analysis. • We use maps of science to suggest potential interdisciplinary links and then confirm these with co-citation contexts. 2 Assumptions about maps of science: • Maps of science summarize or capsulize relationships between large aggregations of scientific literature. • In our methodology, the larger aggregates are formed by an iterative co-citation clustering procedure producing macro-clusters linked by residual co-citations. • By analogy to biological evolution, a map of science is like an adaptive landscape and a macro-cluster on the map is a fitness peak within which scientific concepts are highly evolved and adapted to their local environment. • Interdisciplinary co-citation is analogous to valley crossing-moving from one fitness peak to another through regions of low fitness or adaptation, and high uncertainty