Identification of converging research areas using publication and citation data

Converging research is the emergence of new interdisciplinary research from fields which showed limited mutual interdisciplinary connections before. We describe three search strategies to identify converging research using data extracted from the WoS, including the social sciences and humanities. The field-to-field references (FFR) strategy uses citations from one journal subject category (JSC), to another; the keyword sets (KWS) strategy tracks the co-occurrence of keywords from different JSCs; and the affiliation patterns (AFP) strategy traces the co-occurrence of fields of research in author affiliations of papers. Resulting publication sets were assessed using data such as journal names, titles of publications, and titles of cited publications. Experts validated nine converging research areas that were detected using the KWS and FFR strategies; none were found with AFP strategy. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

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