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Friday 7 June 2013

A multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary or monodisciplinary field


The Swedish researcher Emin Tengström (1993). described cross-disciplinary research as a process, not a state or structure. He differentiates three levels of ambition regarding cross-disciplinary research:
The ”Pluridisciplinary” or ”multidisciplinarity” level
The genuine cross-disciplinary level: ”interdisciplinarity”
The discipline-forming level ”transdisciplinarity”
What is described here is a view of social fields as dynamic and changing. Library and information science is viewed as a field that started as a multidisciplinary field based on literature, psychology, sociology, management, computer science etc., which is developing towards an academic discipline in its own right. However, the following quote seems to indicate that LIS is actually developing in the opposite direction:
Chua & Yang (2008) studied papers published in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology in the period 1988-1997 and found, among other things: "Top authors have grown in diversity from those being affiliated predominantly with library/information-related departments to include those from information systems management, information technology, business, and the humanities. Amid heterogeneous clusters of collaboration among top authors, strongly connected crossdisciplinary coauthor pairs have become more prevalent. Correspondingly, the distribution of top keywords’ occurrences that leans heavily on core information science has shifted towards other subdisciplines such as information technology and sociobehavioral science."
As a field with its own body of interrelated concepts, techniques, journals, and professional associations, LIS is clearly a discipline. But by the nature of its subject matter and methods LIS is just as clearly an interdiscipline, drawing on many adjacent fields (see below).

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