What Does the Bibliometrics of an Interdisciplinary Field Tell Us?: The Case of Cognitive Science

Abstract

This study investigated the bibliometric characteristics of an interdisciplinary field, Cognitive Science, which consists of contributions from diverse fields such as psychology, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology, among others. The results showed that there were 4,711 publications in Web of Science between 1900 and 2017, with an exponential increase in the number of publications in recent years. About two-thirds of publications were classified as social science, of which 41% were in the field of psychology. Seventy percent of the publications were journal articles, half of the publications were written by researchers in the USA, and 95% of the publications were in English. Corpus analyses of abstracts and keywords showed that frequently used words included cognitive, science, research, theory, model, cognition, information, learning, and psychology. These analyses also showed that research in this field centered on the common themes of cognition, information, psychology, language, learning, representation, artificial intelligence, and mind before 2010 and focused on more restricted themes such as embodied and extended cognition, morality and religion, quantum, and music after 2010.