Evolution of interdisciplinarity in biodiversity science

The study of biodiversity has grown exponentially in the last thirty years in response to demands for greater understanding of the function and importance of Earth’s biodiversity and finding solutions to conserve it. Here, we test the hypothesis that biodiversity science has become more interdisciplinary over time. To do so, we analyse 97,945 peer-reviewed articles over a twenty-two year time period (1990 - 2012) with a continuous time dynamic model, which classifies articles into concepts (i.e., topics and ideas) based on word co-occurrences. Using the model output, we then quantify different aspects of interdisciplinarity: concept diversity, i.e. the diversity of topics and ideas across subdisciplines in biodiversity science, subdiscipline diversity, i.e. the diversity of subdisciplines across concepts, and network structure, which captures interactions between concepts and subdisciplines. We found that, on average, concept and subdiscipline diversity in biodiversity science were eith...

过去三十年来，为响应人们对深入理解地球生物多样性的功能与重要性、并寻找保护方案的需求，生物多样性研究呈指数级增长。在此，我们验证如下假设：生物多样性科学随时间推移变得愈发跨学科。为此，我们利用连续时间动态模型分析了1990-2012年间（共22年）的97,945篇同行评审文章；该模型基于词汇共现将文章归类为不同概念（即主题与观点）。利用模型输出结果，我们随后量化了跨学科性的不同维度：概念多样性（即生物多样性科学各子学科间主题与观点的多样性）、子学科多样性（即各概念所涉及子学科的多样性），以及捕捉概念与子学科间相互作用的网络结构。我们发现，生物多样性科学中的概念多样性与子学科多样性平均而言要么...