Assistant Professor Christian E. Vincenot of the Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University traces the citation status in related papers on the process of gradually approaching and merging two modeling concepts used in different fields and sublimating them into a unified concept. Clarified by doing.
In "sociology", there is a research method called ABM that models the behavior of an individual and extends it to the entire system to understand complex systems.On the other hand, in "environmental studies", ABM was developed under the name of IBM.Thus, although ABM and IBM have different names and applicable academic disciplines, they are based on the same theory and are expected to merge.
So, this time, Assistant Professor Vincenot observed how ABM and IBM merged across disciplines by analyzing the citation relationships of the papers ("Eurek alert!" WebsiteYou can watch the tracking video at).
As a result, it was confirmed that papers on IBM were actively published in fields such as agriculture and biology in the 1990s, and papers on ABM in fields such as engineering and informatics from the 2000s.At first, IBM and ABM were isolated from each other, but after 2003, the citation relationship between them began, and in 2015, it was possible to observe a state in which the two terms were clearly fused.Surprisingly, only six papers were the key to the fusion, and with the exception of these papers, the ABM-IBM fusion did not occur.
Interdisciplinary research fuses concepts from various disciplines and spurs innovation.By applying the algorithm developed in this research, it is expected that it will be possible to provide a theoretical framework for inventing and constructing academic research.
