Expanding Interdisciplinarity: A bibliometric study of medical education using the MEJ-24
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction Interdisciplinary research has been deemed to be critical in solving society’s wicked problems, including those relevant to medical education. Medical education research has been assumed to be interdisciplinary. However, researchers have questioned this assumption. The present study, a conceptual replication, provides an analysis using a larger dataset and bibliometric methods to bring more clarity to our understanding on the nature of medical education interdisciplinarity or lack thereof. Method The authors retrieved the cited references of all published articles in 24 medical education journals between 2001-2020 from the Web of Science (WoS). We then identified the WoS classifications for the journals of each cited reference. Results The 24 journals published 31,283 articles referencing 723,683 publications. We identified 493,973 (68.3%) of those cited references in 6,618 journals representing 242 categories, which represents 94% of all WoS categories. Close to half of all citations were categorized as “education, scientific disciplines” and “healthcare sciences and services”. Over the two decades studied, we observed consistent growth in the number of references in other categories, such as education, educational research, and nursing. Additionally, the variety of categories represented has also increased from 182 to 233 to include a diversity of topics such as business, management, and linguistics. Discussion This study corroborates prior work while also expanding it. Medical education research is built upon a limited range of fields referenced. Yet, the growth in categories over time and the ongoing increased diversity of included categories suggests interdisciplinarity that until now has yet to be recognized and represents a changing story.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | MetaresearchBibliometrics Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Not applicable | low |
| gpt | Bibliometrics Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Other design | high |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.017 | 0.040 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
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".