The Import and Export of Cognitive Science

From its inception, a large part of the motivation for Cognitive Science has been the need for an interdisciplinary journal for the study of minds and intelligent systems. In the inaugural editorial for the journal, Allan Collins (1977) wrote “Current journals are fragmented along old disciplinary lines, so there is no common place for workers who approach these problems from different disciplines to talk to each other” (p. 1). The interdisciplinarity of the journal has served a valuable cross-fertilization function for those who read the journal to discover articles written for and by practitioners across a wide range of fields. The challenges of building and understanding intelligent systems are sufficiently large that they will most likely require the skills of psychologists, computer scientists, philosophers, educators, neuroscientists, and linguists collaborating and coordinating their efforts. One threat to the interdisciplinarity of Cognitive Science, both the field and journal, is that it may become, or already be, too dominated by psychologists (Schunn, Crowley, & Okada, 1998; Von Eckardt, 2001). One piece of evidence supporting this contention is that many of the manuscripts submitted to Cognitive Science are given “psychology” as a field keyword by their authors. In 2005, psychology was a keyword for 51% of submissions, followed distantly by linguistics (17%), artificial intelligence (13%), neuroscience (10%), computer science (9%), and philosophy (8%) (these percentages sum to more than 100% because authors are not restricted to designating only a single field). Another quantitative way to assess the interdisciplinarity of Cognitive Science as well as its general intellectual niche is to analyze aggregated journal–journal citations. The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) gathers data not only on how individual articles cite one another, but also on macroscopic citation patterns among journals. Journals or sets of journals can be considered as proxies for fields. As fields become established, they often create journals (Leydesdorff, Cozzens, & Van den Besselaar, 1994). As Collins (1977) wrote when launching Cognitive Science, “In starting the journal we are just adding another trapping in the formation of a new discipline” (p. 1). By studying the patterns of citations among journals that cite and are cited by Cognitive Science, we can better: 1) appreciate the scholarly ecology surrounding the journal and the journal’s role within this ecology, 2) establish competitor and alternate jourCognitive Science 30 (2006) 983–993 Copyright © 2006 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.