Exploring the Relationship between the Engineering and Physical Sciences and the Health and Life Sciences by Advanced Bibliometric Methods

Smart S (2014) Exploring the Relationship between the Engineering and Physical Sciences and the Health and Life Sciences by Advanced Bibliometric Methods. PLoS ONE 9(10): e111530. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0111530 Exploring the Relationship between the Engineering and Physical Sciences and the Health and Life Sciences by Advanced Bibliometric Methods Ludo Waltman 0 Anthony F. J. van Raan 0 Sue Smart 0 Vincent Larivie`re, Universite de Montreal, Canada 0 1 Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University , Leiden , The Netherlands , 2 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) , Swindon , United Kingdom We investigate the extent to which advances in the health and life sciences (HLS) are dependent on research in the engineering and physical sciences (EPS), particularly physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. The analysis combines two different bibliometric approaches. The first approach to analyze the 'EPS-HLS interface' is based on term map visualizations of HLS research fields. We consider 16 clinical fields and five life science fields. On the basis of expert judgment, EPS research in these fields is studied by identifying EPS-related terms in the term maps. In the second approach, a large-scale citation-based network analysis is applied to publications from all fields of science. We work with about 22,000 clusters of publications, each representing a topic in the scientific literature. Citation relations are used to identify topics at the EPS-HLS interface. The two approaches complement each other. The advantages of working with textual data compensate for the limitations of working with citation relations and the other way around. An important advantage of working with textual data is in the in-depth qualitative insights it provides. Working with citation relations, on the other hand, yields many relevant quantitative statistics. We find that EPS research contributes to HLS developments mainly in the following five ways: new materials and their properties; chemical methods for analysis and molecular synthesis; imaging of parts of the body as well as of biomaterial surfaces; medical engineering mainly related to imaging, radiation therapy, signal processing technology, and other medical instrumentation; mathematical and statistical methods for data analysis. In our analysis, about 10% of all EPS and HLS publications are classified as being at the EPS-HLS interface. This percentage has remained more or less constant during the past decade. - Data Availability: The authors confirm that, for approved reasons, some access restrictions apply to the data underlying the findings. The data have been obtained from Thomson Reuters Web of Science database. Our license agreement with Thomson Reuters does not allow us to make the data freely available. Readers can contact Thomson Reuters to obtain the data (http://thomsonreuters.com/thomson-reuters-web-of-science/). The online term map visualizations are available at www.cwts.nl/projects/epsrc/. Funding: The authors have no funding or support to report. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. During the last two decades, both the UK and the US have, in comparison with other advanced economies, focused a significantly greater proportion of their research budgets on the health and life sciences (HLS). Particularly in the US there has been has been a significant uplift in HLS funding over the last 10 to 20 years [1]. This is despite the fact that it is widely understood and acknowledged that the interdependencies of the various disciplines require that they all advance together. Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health in the US, commented that scientists can wage an effective war on disease only if we as a nation and as a scientific community harness the energies of many disciplines, not just biology and medicine [2]. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the dependence of HLS advances on research in the engineering and physical sciences (EPS). Our analysis is of a bibliometric nature, complemented with expert judgment. We analyze large quantities of bibliographic data, both textual data from the titles and abstracts of publications and citation data. The data is taken from Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS) database. Our work can be seen within a longstanding tradition of bibliometric research on interdisciplinarity (e.g., [36]). The main contribution that we make is in the advanced bibliometric methodology that we use and also in the specific focus of our analysis on interdisciplinary research at the interface between EPS and HLS research fields. We are not aware of earlier studies that have focused specifically on interdisciplinarity at the EPS-HLS interface. The analysis that we present consists of two parts: N Part 1: Analysis based on term map visualizations. In this analysis, HLS research fields are visualized using so-called term maps (also known as co-word maps), and the role of EPS research in these fields is studied by identifying EPS-related terms in the term maps. The citation impact of the publications in which each term occurs is taken into account as well. The term maps are created using the VOSviewer software [7,8]. cardiac & cardiovascular systems public, environmental & occupational health N Part 2: Analysis based on a large-scale citation-based clustering of publications. In this analysis, publications are grouped into clusters based on their citation relations [9]. Each cluster of publications represents a research topic. Citation relations are used to identify topics at the interface between EPS and HLS research fields. The two parts of the analysis, each based on a very different methodological approach, are intended to be complementary to each other. The advantages of working with textual data (Part 1) compensate for the limitations of working with citation relations (Part 2) and the other way around. An important advantage of working with textual data is in the in-depth qualitative insights it provides. Working with citation relations, on the other hand, yields many relevant quantitative statistics. In cases in which the results of the two parts of our analysis converge, this can be considered to strengthen the overall evidence provided by the analysis. The organization of this paper is as follows. We first present the methodology and results of Part 1 of our analysis. We then discuss Part 2 of our analysis. Finally, we summarize our main conclusions. Analysis Based on Term Map Visualizations In this section, we discuss our analysis based on term map visualizations. Term maps are produced for 21 HLS research fields. For each of these fields, the role of EPS research in the field is analyzed by identifying EPS-related terms in the term map of the field. We first present the methodology that we use. We then report the results of the analysis. Methodology Our methodo (...truncated)