Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Academic Cartography of Sugar Sweetened Beverages: Scientific and Technical Interdisciplinarity

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This research investigates the interaction between scientific and legal academic publications to understand interdisciplinary communication and illuminate how science can inform and influence government policy through legal academic papers. While many researchers have studied patterns in scientific articles, little research contemplates how legal academic articles fit into the publication enterprise. Legal publications are housed in different academic databases, and are the product of a different publication structure primarily curated by law students. Unlike scientific articles, many legal articles specifically target statutory, regulatory, and judicial policy. These articles can and do influence government policy. Additionally, articles on the same topic may discuss that topic in vastly different ways in legal versus scientific papers due to a difference in training and academic culture. This research looks at one specific topic 'sugar sweetened beverages' that is currently trending in both scientific and academic publications to serve as a case study. It examines the network patterns of how scientific and legal articles cite one another across two academic publication databases (SCOPUS and LexisNexis). In addition to looking at the citation patterns, this research also looks at the textual content of these articles using a natural language processing technique and creates a second network that maps the articles based on their content similarity. By looking at the differences between the citation patterns and the textual content similarity of the articles, this research can identify papers and authors that straddle the boundaries between science and the law. These boundary-spanning authors will then be interviewed about their research process. These citation and content network maps, along with qualitative data about key interdisciplinary authors will explore a key area of interaction between scientific researchers and legal researchers. A better understanding of these relationships can lead to better communication between scientists, legal scholars, and even policy makers with improved impacts for scientific research.