Using network analyses to examine the extent to which and in what ways psychology is multidisciplinary

The emerging field known as the “science of science” uses a variety of quantitative techniques to (among other things) understand how a specific field changes over time. The tools of network science were used to quantify the extent to which Psychology is multidisciplinary, and how the extent to which it is multidisciplinary changed over time. Citation networks were created from all of the articles published in journals identified by the Web of Science as Multidisciplinary-Psychology for each year from 2008 to 2018. Nodes in the networks represented Multidisciplinary-Psychology journals, and connections were placed to other journals (i.e., nodes) that were cited in the Multidisciplinary-Psychology articles for each year. The citation networks showed that about 25% of the citations were to other Multidisciplinary-Psychology journals, about 50% of the citations were to Psychology journals in other sub-fields, and about 25% of the citations were to journals in other disciplines. This distribution of citations remained fairly consistent across the years examined. To identify the ways in which Psychology is multidisciplinary, clusters of nodes (known as modules) in each citation network were detected to identify possible research themes that were examined further with co-word networks made from the author-provided keywords in each of the Multidisciplinary-Psychology articles that appeared in each Module. Some research topics persisted in the years examined, whereas other topics were more transient. Given that multidisciplinary research did not increase over time but instead changed in areas of research focus, ways for academic and research administrators to foster and continually renew multidisciplinary research are discussed. The discussion also describes how individual researchers might use the techniques here to identify areas of research that are less commonly explored and may prove to be fruitful areas to shift their research focus. The same techniques can be used to provide insight in to other disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences.