Research On The Mechanism Of Knowledge Evolution And Growth Of Interdisciplinary Fields In Social Sciences

Interdisciplinary research is a response to the needs of social development and the evolution of science itself.On the one hand,complex social demands and integrated social problems call for the widely cooperation of researchers from different disciplines or research fields.On the other hand,since scientific evolution follows the law of chaos,differentiation,integration and innovation,the phenomenon of great knowledge integration of different disciplines reflects exactly the development law of disciplines.As the bond linking knowledge from different disciplines,interdisciplinary research promotes breakthrough,supplementation and improvement of knowledge in traditional disciplines,and facilitates original discoveries.Promoting interdisciplinary research has thus become an effective path for countries to cope with challenges and enhance national strategic scientific and technological strength.With the increasing importance of interdisciplinary research,studies on interdisciplinary research have also being emerging,but most of which remain at a superficial level of describing the status and evolution of interdisciplinary fields,lacking a deeper exploration of the core issues such as the internal evolution law and knowledge growth mechanism of interdisciplinary fields.Based on research papers in digital governance and by systematic literature review and theoretical exploration,the current study constructs a model of knowledge growth mechanism.The model is composed of two parts – knowledge evolution and knowledge growth mechanism.By comprehensively applying bibliometric methods,social network analysis,topic analysis,and statistical analysis,the dissertation has answered the research questions raised in the current study and proposed policy suggestions accordingly.This study is carried out from four aspects gradually.Firstly,methodology construction for identifying the research boundary of interdisciplinary fields.By employing a variety of data retrieval methods and similar publication expansion algorithms,a multi-round and data-driven iterative search strategy has been established and is used to identified the research scope of digital governance with fuzzy and dynamically changing boundaries,so as to provide a data basis for the subsequent quantitative analysis.Secondly,analysis of the interdisciplinary features of digital governance based on the macro-perspective(Discipline Level),and identification of the interdisciplinary knowledge bases by forming disciplinary knowledge networks so as to find out knowledge links of supporting disciplines and the evolution laws of the knowledge system.Thirdly,exploration of the core topics of digital governance,and the temporal and structural evolution mechanisms of the research topics based on the meso-perspective(Topic Level).Fourthly,exploration of the impact factors and mechanisms of knowledge growth in interdisciplinary research based on the micro-perspective(Publication Level),so as to supplement knowledge growth theories and provides scientific guidance for the formulation of policies in interdisciplinary fields of social sciences.The results show that: 1)It is reasonable to identify the coverage of an interdisciplinary field with fuzzy and dynamically changing boundaries through a data-driven and multi-round iteration retrieval strategy with four steps.2)Digital governance features an extensive research scope,including both digital government research with the government as the core entity,and other governance fields formed by enterprises,the society and other entities resulted from adaption efforts to the information society;3)Digital governance research has distributed in a wide range of disciplines with growing interdisciplinarity and expanding scale of disciplinary knowledge networks.An increasing number of marginal or outlier disciplines are transforming into core disciplines;4)Digital governance research mainly focuses on digital technology,digital government and other fields of digital governance.Interrelationships between various topics become complicated gradually and research contents become diversified.Inheritance,fragmentation,integration,mutation,migration,innovation,and other evolutionary laws exist among the topic knowledge units;5)Interdisciplinarity,knowledge accumulation,knowledge dissemination speed,knowledge impact and knowledge criticality are the main factors affecting the growth of new knowledge,but with difference in terms of exerting positive or negative impact.Absorbing knowledge from a large number of distant disciplines is not helpful to the growth of new knowledge,and the adoption of traditional knowledge with strong direct relations in the knowledge network is not helpful to the growth of knew knowledge.New knowledge is more likely to grow in disciplines with solid knowledge accumulation and efficient knowledge dissemination environment.In the knowledge citation network,absorbing more critical knowledge with a bridging role facilitates the growth of new knowledge.Accordingly,this study puts forward policy suggestions: The laws of disciplinary development should be fully respected in promoting interdisciplinary integration,and the depth,speed and breadth of integration of knowledge from different disciplines should not be pursued recklessly;optimize the macro layout of disciplines: encourage the steady development of important basic disciplines so that they can establish a solid knowledge foundation for inter-disciplines or research fields on the one hand,and rationalize the layout of inter-disciplines or research fields on the other hand,so as to achieve the synergistic development of inter-disciplines and basic disciplines;promote knowledge dissemination efficiency among different disciplines or sub-disciplines through multiple channels;and enhance in-depth mining and long-term tracking of high-impact and innovative knowledge.