Formalizing Interdisciplinary Collaboration in the CogSci Community
- Lauren Oey, Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States
- Isabella Destefano, Department of Psychology, University of San Diego , La Jolla, California, United States
- Erik Brockbank, Computational Cognition Lab, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California, United States
- Ed Vul, Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, United States
AbstractIs cognitive science interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary? We contribute to this debate by examining the authorship structure and topic similarity of contributions to the Cognitive Science Society from 2000 to 2019. We compare findings from CogSci to abstracts from the Vision Science Society over the same time frame. Our analysis focuses on graph theoretic features of the co-authorship network---edge density, transitivity, and maximum subgraph size---as well as clustering within the topic space of CogSci contributions. We also combine structural and semantic information with an analysis of homophily. We validate this approach by predicting new collaborations in this year's CogSci proceedings. Our results suggest that cognitive science has become increasingly interdisciplinary in the last 19 years. More broadly, we argue that a formal quantitative approach which combines structural co-authorship information and semantic topic analysis provides inroads to questions about the level of interdisciplinary collaboration in the cognitive science community.