A Transdisciplinary Approach to Construct Search and Integration

Human behaviors play a leading role in many critical areas including the adoption of information systems, prevention of many diseases, and educational achievement. There has been explosive growth of research in the behavioral sciences during the past decade. Behavioral science researchers are now recognizing that due to this ever expanding volume of research it is impossible to find and incorporate all appropriate inter-related disciplinary knowledge. Unfortunately, due to inconsistent language and construct proliferation across disciplines, this excellent but disconnected research has not been utilized fully or effectively to address problems of human health or other areas. This paper introduces a newly developed, cutting edge technology, the Inter-Nomological Network (INN) which for the first time provides an integrating tool to behavioral scientists so they may effectively build upon prior research. We expect INN to provide the first step in moving the behavioral sciences into an era of integrated science. INN is based on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a theory of language use with associated automatic computerized text analysis capabilities.