Industrial Engineering as a Multidisciplinary Field : Exploring the Structure of Academic Convergence in Industrial Engineering by Journal Citation Network Analysis

Abstract

One of the distinctive characteristics of industrial engineering (IE) is its multidisciplinarity. This paper explores the multidisciplinary nature of IE using journal citation network analysis. Using the relatedness indexes of IE journals obtained from journal citation report (JCR), we firstly construct the IE network only composed of 26 IE journals. The resulting IE network is partitioned into three sub-networks: management engineering, manufacturing/quality, and ergonomics. We then propose the IE convergence network which includes 81 related journals in other disciplines as well as 26 IE journals. Scrutinizing the IE convergence network reveals that IE has a high degree of interactions with seven disciplines : Operations Research and Management Science, Statistics and Probability, Manufacturing Engineering, Computer Science, Engineering Design, Business Management, Human Factors and Ergonomics. We investigate the contributions of the related disciplines to IE as well as contributions of IE to the related disciplines. The role of IE journals in exchanging knowledge with related disciplines is also identified by brokerage analysis. It is shown that visualizing and analyzing the IE convergence network canprovide an excellent overview of the multidisciplinary structure of IE, which can help IE researchers easily grasp the state-of-the art of IE research.