How Do Academic Fields Define Valuable Knowledge Differently?
Do academic disciplines differ systematically in how they frame the significance and contribution of research?
Academic fields develop different intellectual norms about what makes research important. This project uses large-scale scholarly text to examine discipline-specific patterns in how researchers describe novelty, significance, contribution, and broader relevance — and whether these differences create barriers or opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and evaluation.
Scholarly text · NLP · Embeddings · Large-scale text analysis · Cross-disciplinary comparison · Experimental follow-up studies
More detail
Why it matters
Disciplinary norms about what counts as important research are usually implicit, carried through training and community practice rather than stated outright. Making these norms visible at scale helps clarify where interdisciplinary collaboration and evaluation succeed or break down — for instance, when a contribution framed as significant in one field reads as incremental, or illegible, in another.
Data
Large-scale text drawn from published scholarly writing across multiple disciplines. This is an ongoing project; corpus construction and field coverage are still being finalized.
Approach
The analysis combines NLP and embedding methods to characterize how researchers across fields describe novelty, significance, and contribution, then compares these patterns systematically across disciplines. A planned experimental component will test whether disciplinary framing itself — independent of content — shapes how scholars evaluate research originating inside versus outside their own field.
Findings
Findings are still being developed and will be added as the analysis progresses.
My contribution
Lead researcher, responsible for conceptual development, computational analysis, and the design of the planned follow-up experiments.
Outputs
No public outputs yet — this project is in progress.