Exploration of interdisciplinarity in nanotechnology queries: The use of transaction log analysis and thesauri

Abstract

Nanoscience and technology is characterized by nano researchers as an increasingly interdisciplinary domain, drawing upon such disciplines as chemistry, physics, materials science, and computer, electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineering. A key challenge faced by information professionals involved in organizing and providing the related information services is to efficiently identify information resources and to carry out inclusive and effective searches in a diverse and heterogeneous range of digital libraries, web-based databases and search engines. This demand emphasizes the importance of thinking about and developing methodological models for investigating interdisciplinary knowledge organization practices. This 2008 study examined the extent of interdisciplinarity in user queries submitted to the NANOnetBASE digital library. Transaction logs of the digital library were analyzed to explore users' search behaviour patterns and to examine the extent to which user queries were interdisciplinary. The Inspect thesaurus and Classification codes were utilized as the disciplinary or interdisciplinary focus of the queries. The results indicate that 62% of the unique top terms resulting from mapping users' query terms to the INSPEC Classification codes represented two or more disciplines, specifically terms associated with the Classification code 'A' representing "physics." The results contribute to the development of more critical information organization and classification practices in such an increasingly interdisciplinary domain as nanoscience and technology.