Abstract:

This paper applies co-citation analysis method to interdisciplinary research field and takesChinese Medicine interdisciplinary research field as a case study to reveal its knowledge sources. Taking 248 core journals in the field of medicine and health, which were included in “General Contents of Chinese Core Journal (2011ed)” as data source to construct CMSCI database, and based on Chinese Library Classification (4ed), to identify 13,259 papers as interdisciplinary literature on Chinese Medicine . It then adopts CiteSpaceⅢ to visualize the important knowledge sources and interprets their characteristics according to years of publication. This paper revels that 1) the interdisciplinary studies between pharmacy and Chinese medicine is the primary one for interdisciplinary research in the field; 2) the knowledge sources varies in different periods, but four theoretic classics on traditional Chinese medicine remain to be the essential knowledge sources and are cited frequently; 3)literatures such as the co-authored Chinese Pharmacopoeia constitute the important basis of knowledge sources; 4) scholars at home are increasing their attention to foreign counterparts from 2004 to 2012, when their intellectual updates fastened at a high speed.

Key words: Interdisciplinary, Knowledge sources, Chinese medicine, Knowledge mapping