Interdisciplinary scholarly communication: an exploratory study for the field of joint attention

Understanding communications across disciplines is critical to the promotion of interdisciplinary innovation. Using research into the psychological concept of joint attention (JA) as an example of shared interest, this paper focuses on studies of JA across three different domains (child psychology, robotics, and human–computer interaction) and analyzes topic evolution in JA in these three domains, as well as lead–lag and topic similarity between domains. Our empirical study has yielded interesting findings. First, the analysis of topic evolution indicates that the three domains have distinctive topic evolution patterns, which reflected in both the topic division and merge phenomena and points of focus. Second, lead–lag clearly exists between different domains, which allowed knowledge diffusion to be viewed from a macroscopic perspective. Third, topic similarity across different domains can be identified with its migrations and changes in content, which helps to improve understanding of the impact of topics between domains and of interdependence within disciplines. This paper provides a foundation for further research that may improve communications across disciplines, thereby facilitating interdisciplinary innovation.