Feature analysis of multidisciplinary scientific collaboration behaviors: A case study on PNAS.

The features of collaboration behaviors are often considered to be different from discipline to discipline. Meanwhile, collaborating among disciplines is an obvious feature emerged in modern scientific research, which incubates several interdisciplines, such as sustainability science. The features of collaborations in and among the disciplines of biological, physical and social sciences are analyzed based on 52,803 papers published in a multidisciplinary journal PNAS during 1999 to 2013. In the aspect of similarities, the data emerge the similar transitivity and assortativity of collaboration behaviors, the identical distribution type of collaborators per author and that of papers per author. In the aspect of interactions, the data show a considerable proportion of authors engaging in interdisciplinary research, and the more collaborators and papers an author has, the more likely the author pursues interdisciplinary research. The analysis of the paper contents illustrates that the development of each science category has an equilibrium relationship in the long-run with the developments of typical research paradigms and transdisciplinary disciplines. Hence, those unified methodologies can be viewed as grounds for the interactions.