Interdisciplinarity in medical education research: myth and reality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The medical education (Med Ed) research community characterises itself as drawing on the insights, methods, and knowledge from multiple disciplines and research domains (e.g. Sociology, Anthropology, Education, Humanities, Psychology). This common view of Med Ed research is echoed and reinforced by the narrative used by leading Med Ed departments and research centres to describe their activities as "interdisciplinary." Bibliometrics offers an effective method of investigating scholarly communication to determine what knowledge is valued, recognized, and utilized. By empirically examining whether knowledge production in Med Ed research draws from multiple disciplines and research areas, or whether it primarily draws on the knowledge generated internally within the field of Med Ed, this article explores whether the characterisation of Med Ed research as interdisciplinary is substantiated. A citation analysis of 1412 references from research articles published in 2017 in the top five Med Ed journals was undertaken. A typology of six knowledge clusters was inductively developed. Findings show that the field of Med Ed research draws predominantly from two knowledge clusters: the Applied Health Research cluster (made of clinical and health services research), which represents 41% of the references, and the Med Ed research cluster, which represents 40% of the references. These two clusters cover 81% of all references in our sample, leaving 19% distributed among the other knowledge clusters (i.e., Education, disciplinary, interdisciplinary and topic centered research). The quasi-hegemonic position held by the Applied Health and Med Ed research clusters confines the other sources of knowledge to a peripheral role within the Med Ed research field. Our findings suggest that the assumption that Med Ed research is an interdisciplinary field is not convincingly supported by empirical data and that the knowledge entering Med Ed comes mostly from the health research domain.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.113 | 0.081 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.184 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.045 | 0.046 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".