Identifying the core of an emerging multidisciplinary domain

New scientific fields often grow from the intersections and boundaries between existing disciplines. Before these new domains are well established, with important authors and key journals, publications are usually mixed into the journals and conferences of the parent domains, making it difficult to identify core works. This paper presents a validated approach that begins by finding authors in three disciplines who are contributing to the emerging field of quantitative microbial risk analysis, then mining their coauthors and citations to characterize the new domain. The algorithm's results are more comprehensive if the solution sets for the three fields are combined for processing at the end, rather than treating the new field as already established in the intersection of the selected authors.