Interdisciplinarity research based on NSFC-sponsored projects: A case study of mathematics in Chinese universities

RESEARCH ARTICLE Interdisciplinarity research based on NSFCsponsored projects: A case study of mathematics in Chinese universities Zhi-Yi Shao1,2*, Yong-Ming Li1,2,3, Fen Hui2, Yang Zheng2, Ying-Jie Guo4 1 School of Mathematics and Information Science, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China, 2 The Library, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China, 3 School of Computer Science, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China, 4 School of Foreign Languages, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Shao Z-Y, Li Y-M, Hui F, Zheng Y, Guo YJ (2018) Interdisciplinarity research based on NSFC-sponsored projects: A case study of mathematics in Chinese universities. PLoS ONE 13 (7): e0201577. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0201577 Editor: Filippo Radicchi, Indiana University, UNITED STATES Received: October 28, 2016 Accepted: July 18, 2018 Published: July 31, 2018 Copyright: © 2018 Shao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This work is supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant 2016M600763; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 11671244, 61602291; the Scientific Research Cultivating Projects of Shaanxi Social Science Information Society under Grant shxhx2015011. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and * Abstract We investigate the interdisciplinarity of mathematics based on an analysis of projects sponsored by the NSFC (National Natural Science Foundation of China). The motivation of this study lies in obtaining an efficient method to quantify the research interdisciplinarities, revealing the research interdisciplinarity patterns of mathematics discipline, giving insights for mathematics scholars to improve their research, and providing empirical supports for policy making. Our data set includes 6147 NSFC-sponsored projects implemented by 3225 mathematics professors in 177 Chinese universities with established mathematics departments. We propose the weighted-mean DIRD (diversity of individual research disciplines) to quantify interdisciplinarity. In addition, we introduce the matrix computation method, discover several properties of such a matrix, and make the computation cost significantly lower than the bitwise computation method. Finally, we develop an automatic DIRD computing system. The results indicate that mathematics professors at top normal universities in China exhibit strong interdisciplinarity; mathematics professors are most likely to conduct interdisciplinary research involving information science (research department), computer science (research area), computer application technology (research field), and power system bifurcation and chaos (research direction). Introduction Interdisciplinary research integrates the perspectives, concepts, theories, tools, techniques, information, and/or data from different specialized knowledge or research practices [1]. Its purpose is to advance fundamental understanding and/or solve problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single research field [2]. because it is important to make breakthroughs and to achieve more relevant outcomes [3], China’s National Natural Science Foundation (NSFC) [4]and the USA’s National Science Foundation (NSF) [5] understand the importance of–and have established relevant polices to improve–interdisciplinary research. However, interdisciplinary research has also been associated with negative features, such as consistently lower funding success [6]. PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0201577 July 31, 2018 1 / 19 Interdisciplinarity research based on NSFC-sponsored projects analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. http://www.nsfc.gov.cn/. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Interdisciplinarity research involves the study of interdisciplinarity among researchers, institutions, and research areas. These studies are conducted on the basis of assessments of published papers, research projects, patents and/or other factors. An analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity to scientific impact [7]. Interdisciplinarity also helps improve the prediction accuracy of outstanding papers [8]. Interdisciplinary research helps improves specialized studies, while interdisciplinarity research helps decision makers to better understand the patterns of interdisciplinary research, which is critical for scientific decision making. Based on published papers, researchers investigated interdisciplinarity in the following research areas: chemistry [9], physics [10], nanoscience and nanotechnology[11–13], biotechnology [14], information science and library science [15–18], humanities [19], bionanoscience [3, 20], Japanese rice research and technology development [21], biochemistry and molecular biology [22], medical science [23], and biotechnology [24]. The problem regarding studies based on published papers is the incomplete collection of bibliographic data, although this issue has recently been addressed from a technical perspective [25]. However, there have been only scant studies regarding interdisciplinarity as it pertains to mathematics. Previous studies have addressed interdisciplinarity at research institutions. For example, Cassi et al. defined a framework for institutional interdisciplinarity analysis [26], and Gowanlock and Gazan investigated the interdisciplinarity of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the University of Hawaii [27]. Jensen and Lutkouskaya investigated the interdisciplinarities of 600 laboratories of CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), which is the largest scientific organization in Europe [28]. However, few studies have focused on normal universities. Interdisciplinarity studies based on an analysis of sponsored projects are limited, which may be a result of the difficulty in retrieving and analyzing scientific funding. The interdisciplinarities of social, behavioral, and economic sciences have been investigated under the auspices of the NSF [29]. Notably, NSFC data indicate that more than 59% of applicants change their application disciplines to pursue interdisciplinary funding applications [30]. Moreover, interdisciplinary big data studies in the US and China have been compared insofar as they relate to NSF- and NSFC-sponsored projects [31]. However, evaluating scientific funding plays an important role because it is critical for decision making. Inequality in scientific funding is increasing at an accelerated rate [32], and the “Matthew Effect” has been (...truncated)