“One Health” or Three? Publication Silos Among the One Health Disciplines

The One Health initiative is a global effort fostering interdisciplinary collaborations to address challenges in human, animal, and environmental health. While One Health has received considerable press, its benefits remain unclear because its effects have not been quantitatively described. We systematically surveyed the published literature and used social network analysis to measure interdisciplinarity in One Health studies constructing dynamic pathogen transmission models. The number of publications fulfilling our search criteria increased by 14.6% per year, which is faster than growth rates for life sciences as a whole and for most biology subdisciplines. Surveyed publications clustered into three communities: one used by ecologists, one used by veterinarians, and a third diverse-authorship community used by population biologists, mathematicians, epidemiologists, and experts in human health. Overlap between these communities increased through time in terms of author number, diversity of co-author affiliations, and diversity of citations. However, communities continue to differ in the systems studied, questions asked, and methods employed. While the infectious disease research community has made significant progress toward integrating its participating disciplines, some segregation—especially along the veterinary/ecological research interface—remains."One Health" is a global initiative fostering interdisciplinary collaborations to address health challenges. Although an empirical analysis of published disease models shows a rapid growth in cross-disciplinary "One Health" collaborations, the continued segregation of medical, veterinary, and ecological communities poses an ongoing challenge.Author Summary: A cohesive reaction to emerging threats requires the efficient dissemination of knowledge and methodologies across multiple disciplinary boundaries. A “One Health” approach has been advocated to facilitate cross-disciplinary communication and research in responding to challenges in human, animal, and environmental health. We empirically describe collaboration networks surrounding one aspect of this One Health initiative: infectious disease transmission models. A systematic literature review and social network analysis showed that dynamic disease modelling grew faster than most biological and natural science disciplines over the last 25 y, yet the field remains somewhat compartmentalized. Many researchers contribute to a broad, cross-disciplinary group of journals, but publications from veterinarians and ecologists remain segregated into relatively discrete communities. While the veterinary and ecological communities regularly reference the broad, cross-disciplinary group, they only rarely cite each other; furthermore, the highest-tiered medical journals contributed very few papers to our search. Therefore, our results are somewhat mixed: while One Health may have precipitated a great deal of research interest in infectious disease, it has not fully overcome the barriers that segregate its contributing disciplines.