Extracting Evolving Trend from Research Papers: A Meta-Analysis of X-Discipline Research in Higher Education

With the complex problem resulting from the rapid change in global society and the environment, the focus of higher education has changed from cultivating specialists to empowering talent with multiple domain knowledge. Four terms, including “cross-disciplinary,” “multi-disciplinary,” “interdisciplinary,” and “trans-disciplinary,” have often been used to describe the activities that fall outside traditional disciplinary boundaries. We use “x-discipline” hereafter to refer to research that involves two or more academic disciplines, including but not limited to cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and trans-disciplinary research. How did x-discipline research evolve? What are the research topics across disciplines? Do the prevalent topics change over time? Is there a transition in x-discipline research? These questions require systematic investigation of x-discipline research to date. To answer these questions, we collected 26,797 research abstracts and used a term weighting scheme (Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency [TF-IDF]) and an unsupervised document cluster method (Structural Topic Modeling) for further analysis. The framework we used helps identify the keywords and themes of cross-domain research over time, which provide schools with information on resource allocation and develop strategies to cope with national policies and social needs.