Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Is cognitive science interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary? Wecontribute to this debate by examining the authorship struc-ture and topic similarity of contributions to the Cognitive Sci-ence Society from 2000 to 2019. We compare findings fromCogSci to abstracts from the Vision Science Society over thesame time frame. Our analysis focuses on graph theoretic fea-tures of the co-authorship network—edge density, transitivity,and maximum subgraph size—as well as clustering within thetopic space of CogSci contributions. We also combine struc-tural and semantic information with an analysis of homophily.We validate this approach by predicting new collaborations inthis year’s CogSci proceedings. Our results suggest that cog-nitive science has become increasingly interdisciplinary in thelast 19 years. More broadly, we argue that a formal quantita-tive approach which combines structural co-authorship infor-mation and semantic topic analysis provides inroads to ques-tions about the level of interdisciplinary collaboration in thecognitive science community.