Integration by Parts: Collaboration and Topic Structure in the CogSci Community

Abstract

Is cognitive science interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary? We contribute to this debate by examining the authorship structure and topic similarity of contributions to the Cognitive Science Society from 2000 to 2019. Our analysis focuses on graph theoretic features of the co-authorship network—edge density, transitivity, and maximum subgraph size—as well as clustering within the space of scientific topics. We also combine structural and semantic information with an analysis of how authors choose their collaborators based on their interests and prior collaborations. We compare findings from CogSci to abstracts from the Vision Science Society over the same time frame and validate our approach by predicting new collaborations in the 2020 CogSci proceedings. Our results suggest that collaboration across authors and topics within cognitive science has become increasingly integrated in the last 19 years. More broadly, we argue that a formal quantitative approach which combines structural co-authorship information and semantic topic analysis provides inroads to questions about the level of interdisciplinary collaboration in a scientific community.