Interdisciplinarity in Cognitive Science: A Document Similarity Analysis

Cognitive science was established as an interdisciplinary domain of research in the 1970s. Since then, the domain has flourished, despite disputes concerning its interdisciplinarity. Multiple methods exist for the assessment of interdisciplinary research. The present study proposes a methodology for quantifying interdisciplinary aspects of research in cognitive science. We propose models for text similarity analysis that provide helpful information about the relationship between publications and their specific research fields, showing potential as a robust measure of interdisciplinarity. We designed and developed models utilizing the Doc2Vec method for analyzing cognitive science and related fields. Our findings reveal that cognitive science collaborates closely with most constituent disciplines. For instance, we found a balanced engagement between several constituent fields-including psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science-that contribute significantly to cognitive science. On the other hand, anthropology and neuroscience have made limited contributions. In our analysis, we find that the scholarly domain of cognitive science has been exhibiting overt interdisciplinary for the past several decades.