Boundary crossing in research literatures as a means of interdisciplinary information transfer

Contemporary models of interdisciplinary information transfer treat disciplines as such sharply bounded groups that boundary-crossing publication (contributions to disciplinary literatures authored by researchers from other disciplines) should be very difficult, if not impossible. Yet boundary-crossing authors can be identified in many disciplinary literatures. A study of four core journals in political science and sociology identified 199 articles with first authors from other disciplines published between 1971 and 1990. Two-thirds of these articles had single authors, and only one in six had coauthors from the discipline of the journal in which they were published. Readership and use of these articles, as measured by citation rates, was only slightly below normal. The articles were judged successful in interdisciplinary information transfer in that they received more citations from the disciplines in which they were published than from the disciplines with which their first authors were affiliated, and more citations from other disciplines than from either the discipline of publication or the first author's discipline. Results suggest that disciplinary boundaries are less restrictive than the literature suggests, and that boundary-crossing publications are involved in complex patterns of interdisciplinary information transfer.