Tracking Cross-Disciplinary Information Use by Author Affiliation: Demonstration of a Method

In this paper, we report the results of a bibliometric study in which we track cross-disciplinary citation behavior in the sciences. We hypothesize that cross-disciplinary citation in the sciences increased over the time period 1985–2000. Unlike most previous studies in this area, we assign discipline to a paper by its first author’s affiliation, and we hypothesize that assigning papers to disciplines based on first-author affiliation would yield results consistent with previous findings on cross-disciplinary citation rates in the sciences. Using the output of scientists in Biological Sciences, Chemistry, and Physics departments at 12 large research universities in 1985, 1990, 1995, and 2000 as our data set, we measure the cross-disciplinary citation rates of each discipline and compare our results to the findings of previous studies in this area.