Exploring the Relationship between the Engineering and Physical Sciences and the Health and Life Sciences by Advanced Bibliometric Methods

We investigate the extent to which advances in the health and life sciences (HLS) are dependent on research in the engineering and physical sciences (EPS), particularly physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. The analysis combines two different bibliometric approaches. The first approach t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one Vol. 9; no. 10; p. e111530
Main Authors: Waltman, Ludo, van Raan, Anthony F. J., Smart, Sue
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States Public Library of Science 31.10.2014
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects:
Bibliometrics
Biological products
Biological Science Disciplines - statistics & numerical data
Biomaterials
Chemical synthesis
Citation analysis
Citations
Cluster Analysis
Computer and Information Sciences
Data analysis
Data processing
Documents
Engineering
Engineering - statistics & numerical data
Health - statistics & numerical data
Instrumentation
Interdisciplinary aspects
Life sciences
Mapping
Methods
Natural language processing
Natural Science Disciplines - statistics & numerical data
Network analysis
Neural networks
Physical sciences
Physics
Publications - statistics & numerical data
Qualitative analysis
Radiation
Radiation therapy
Research and Analysis Methods
Science Policy
Scientific papers
Scientometrics
Signal processing
Statistical analysis
Statistical methods
United Kingdom
United States > US
Netherlands
ISSN:1932-6203, 1932-6203
Online Access:Get full text
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Description
Summary:We investigate the extent to which advances in the health and life sciences (HLS) are dependent on research in the engineering and physical sciences (EPS), particularly physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. The analysis combines two different bibliometric approaches. The first approach to analyze the 'EPS-HLS interface' is based on term map visualizations of HLS research fields. We consider 16 clinical fields and five life science fields. On the basis of expert judgment, EPS research in these fields is studied by identifying EPS-related terms in the term maps. In the second approach, a large-scale citation-based network analysis is applied to publications from all fields of science. We work with about 22,000 clusters of publications, each representing a topic in the scientific literature. Citation relations are used to identify topics at the EPS-HLS interface. The two approaches complement each other. The advantages of working with textual data compensate for the limitations of working with citation relations and the other way around. An important advantage of working with textual data is in the in-depth qualitative insights it provides. Working with citation relations, on the other hand, yields many relevant quantitative statistics. We find that EPS research contributes to HLS developments mainly in the following five ways: new materials and their properties; chemical methods for analysis and molecular synthesis; imaging of parts of the body as well as of biomaterial surfaces; medical engineering mainly related to imaging, radiation therapy, signal processing technology, and other medical instrumentation; mathematical and statistical methods for data analysis. In our analysis, about 10% of all EPS and HLS publications are classified as being at the EPS-HLS interface. This percentage has remained more or less constant during the past decade.
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Conceived and designed the experiments: LW AFJvR SS. Performed the experiments: LW. Analyzed the data: LW AFJvR SS. Contributed to the writing of the manuscript: LW AFJvR SS.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0111530