Interdisciplinarity in cultural gerontology and geriatric medical humanities – a bibliometric survey

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-4685602/v1

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Research Article

Interdisciplinarity in cultural gerontology and geriatric medical humanities – a bibliometric survey

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-4685602/v1

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Purpose

Cultural gerontology – understanding ageing through the lens of arts and humanities - has emerged as an important element of epistemology of ageing. As a boundary area between geriatric medicine/gerontology and arts/humanities disciplines, joint-working/interdisciplinarity is desirable. This project aims to assess the degree of joint-working manifested in cultural gerontology by authorship and acknowledgements in papers dedicated to cultural gerontology in five journals.

Methods

Observational survey of authorship in 5 journals from the founding of the specific sections on cultural gerontology or specific dedicated journals, assessing number of authors, disciplinary identities, and evidence of joint working within cultural gerontology.

Results

Of 591 papers, 481 (81%) were single authors. There was a spread of disciplinary affiliations, 247 (41.8%) gerontology/age-studies, 169 arts/humanities/social sciences (28.6%) and 133 of uncertain affiliation (22.5%): only 38 papers had a clear indication of joint working across the disciplines (6.4%). In the two geriatric medicine journals, European Geriatric Medicine and Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, authorship was almost exclusively from geriatric medicine/gerontology. There was extremely limited use of acknowledgements.

Conclusion

Our study indicates that single authorship is the most frequent mode of peer-reviewed publishing in cultural gerontology, while acknowledging that some authors may have scholarly training in multiple fields but are listed as unidisciplinary. Leaders in the field and editors of relevant journals/section need to consider ways of encouraging and recognising joint working, through fuller descriptions of multiple affiliations, brief author biographies, fuller use of acknowledgements and consideration of brief accompanying discussant responses from complementary disciplines.

Aging

Humanities

Interdisciplinary Studies

Aim: Cultural gerontology – a key element of understanding ageing – implies joint working between scholars in arts and humanities with geriatricians and gerontologists: our aim was to quantify the existing degree of joint working.
Findings: Joint scholarship between scholars in arts and humanities with geriatricians and gerontologists is very limited
Message: Leaders in the field and editors of relevant journals or journal sections need to consider ways of encouraging and recognising joint working

Cultural gerontology – understanding ageing through the lens of arts and humanities - has emerged as an important element of epistemology of ageing¹. As a boundary area between geriatric medicine/gerontology and arts/humanities disciplines, joint-working/interdisciplinarity is desirable. This project aims to assess the degree of joint-working manifested in cultural gerontology by authorship and acknowledgements in papers dedicated to cultural gerontology in five journals.

Although there has been an acknowledgement of the necessity of interdisciplinarity within aging research², this project aims to determine whether similar developments have been made in cultural gerontology. Within other medical areas, such as psychiatry, it has been shown that collaborative work with the arts and humanities is beneficial³, and the implications of this in cultural gerontology should be further studied.

Observational survey of authorship in 5 journals either dedicated to cultural gerontology or with a dedicated section for cultural gerontology; ‘European Geriatric Medicine (EGM),’ ‘Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal (ACH),’ ‘Journal of the American Geriatric Society (JAGS),’ Journal of Aging, Humanities and the Arts (JAHA),’ and ‘The Gerontologist (TG).’ Articles were included from the founding of the specific sections on cultural gerontology or specific dedicated journals, assessing number of authors, disciplinary identities, and evidence of joint working within cultural gerontology.

For JAGS we included all relevant articles within the ‘Ars Longa: Humanities and Aging’ section from 2021, all relevant articles from ACH from its founding in 2014, all articles within the section ‘Geriatric Medical Classics’ in EGM from 2019, and all humanities related articles in TG from 2011 until March 2023. We extracted the following variables from each published paper: number of authors (single or multiple); type of article (book review, film review, original article, research article, essays), proportion of each article type within a journal, author affiliations; number of disciplines listed per author. We grouped authors declared as gerontology, age studies, geriatrics, and health and social science disciplines together, and those declared as humanities and arts together.

We also surveyed the degree to which collaboration, if any, was attributed in the acknowledgements of the papers we studied. We did this because acknowledgements often contain useful additional information which can be a method of identifying joint working⁴. If there was any discrepancy/uncertainty about any classifications of affiliations/acknowledgments or determining if an article was to be included, it was discussed by the two primary authors with a final adjudication from the senior author (DON). Data was recorded and analysed using Microsoft Excel software. As this was a desk-based research project, ethical approval was not required

Of 591 papers, 481 (81%) declared a single author. There was a spread of disciplinary affiliations, 247 (41.8%) gerontology/age-studies, 169 arts/humanities/social sciences (28.6%) and 133 of uncertain affiliation (22.5%): only 38 papers had a clear indication of joint working across the disciplines (6.4%). In the two geriatric medicine journals, EGM and JAGS, authorship was almost exclusively from geriatric medicine/gerontology. There was extremely limited use of acknowledgements recognising complementary disciplines.

In ACH there was a total of 66 single author papers meeting our requirements, of which 46 had authors affiliated with the humanities, 18 with gerontology/age studies, and 2 of unspecified discipline. Of 11 papers written by multiple authors, 3 had authors only affiliated with humanities, while none were written by authors only affiliated as gerontology/age studies. Seven studies were written by a combination of age studies/gerontology and humanities affiliated authors, while 1 was authored by a combination of age studies/gerontology affiliated authors and authors of unspecified affiliation. This came to a total of 77 papers from this journal, of which 42 were book reviews (54.5% of papers). The range of authors was 1-3, while the average number of authors on multiple author papers was 2.14. There were no disciplinary acknowledgements recorded.

Of 140 papers in JAHA, 110 were single author papers and 30 had multiple authors. Of single author papers, 38 were by humanities affiliated authors, 28 were by gerontology/age studies affiliated authors, and 44 unspecified. The numbers of ranged from 1-6, with an average of 2.93 authors in multiple author papers. Of the multiple author papers 7 were by gerontology/age studies affiliated authors, 5 were by humanities affiliated authors, and 8 were written by a combination of humanities and gerontology/age studies affiliated authors: affiliation was not specified in 10 of the multiple author papers. There were 14 book reviews, of which 13 were written by a single author, and 1 by multiple authors. Of 3 film reviews, one declared multiple authors and 2 single authors. Overall the 17 reviews accounted for 12.1% of papers. There were no clear disciplinary affiliations in acknowledgements.

Of 11 papers in EGM, 4 were single author and 7 had multiple authors, with a range of 1-3. All papers were written by authors with healthcare affiliations and no disciplinary acknowledgements were recorded.

There were 278 single author papers and 55 multiple author papers included from TG. Of single author papers, 127 were book, and 110 film, reviews: there were only 2 double author book reviews and 1 book review with 3 authors. Overall, 237 reviews constituted 72.1% of relevant papers, 85.3% of single author papers and 5.5% of multi-author papers. Of the single author papers, 63 were by humanities affiliated authors, 142 by gerontology/ageing studies affiliated authors, and 3 by authors with both humanities and gerontology/ageing studies affiliations. No disciplinary affiliation was noted for 70 single author papers. Of the multiple author papers, 17 were by gerontology/age studies affiliated authors only, 12 were by humanities affiliated authors only, and 19 were by a combination of humanities and gerontology/age studies affiliated authors, with the remaining 7 by authors of uncertain discipline. There were 3 age studies/gerontology acknowledgements, and 1 arts and humanities acknowledgement in this journal.

Of 30 papers from JAGS, 23 were single author and 7 had multiple authors, with a range of 1-7. Of single author papers, 22 authors had healthcare affiliations and 1 a humanities affiliation. Of the multiple author papers only one paper had both humanities and healthcare affiliated authors, and the average number of authors on a multi-author paper was 2.86. There was only one acknowledgement of note recorded which was to a humanities affiliated contributor. Of the papers included from this journal there were 2 book reviews and 2 film reviews; the book reviews were both single author, while one film review was single author and one had multiple authors.

Interdisciplinarity appears to be relatively rare in the literature of cultural gerontology. There are likely several reasons for this lack of interdisciplinary engagement in authorship

One factor is that in some fields within humanities disciplines, appointment and promotion decisions may favour single authorship⁵⁶. This pressure may lead to authors avoiding recognition of interdisciplinary working to meet promotion and reappointment criteria. We suggest that in this complicated era of scholarship, in order to promote interdisciplinarity, editorial leadership of peer-reviewed journals should encourage transparency in authorship⁷ and promote support from other disciplines (more value should be placed on joint authorship papers)⁸. Possible solutions to increase interdisciplinarity within authorship and enhance collaborations between the humanities, clinicians, and gerontologists, and could include holding educational seminars/conferences to promote joint working and interdisciplinary relationships. Hopefully these conferences would encourage the exchange of knowledge between different institutes/disciplines and promote joint publishing. Also, further research should examine the barriers that prevent joint working⁹ to allow these barriers to be removed as well as establishing facilitators to joint working.

More papers could use the approach of ACH which encourages short biographies of the authors with information on scholarly experience and affiliations. There could also be the use of detailed descriptions of the roles that each of the authors had in producing the paper, so that it is clear whether the joint work constitutes an interdisciplinary (involving connected contributions from different disciplines) or multidisciplinary effort¹⁰. In addition to this a clearer definition of and distinction between the different types of joint working eg. interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinary, would be welcomed. We also suggest more frequent and detailed use of acknowledgements. There was very limited acknowledgement of disciplinary contributions in any of the journals- across all journals, except EGM, single authorship was the most prevalent paper type. Even though the majority of papers in the journal of EGM had multiple authors, there was no arts/humanities authorship in any of the articles, and thus no obvious evidence of joint working in the papers. We recognise that there will always be a role and need for single authorship papers; however, we believe it is likely that more collaborative styles will increase the quality and range of papers published within cultural gerontology and geriatric medical humanities.

Our study had a number of strengths, such as the large number of papers (591) included that were published over a period of 12 years. The broad categorisation we applied also allowed us to follow general trends in authorship in a way that wouldn't be possible without categorising the disciplines.

As well as this, our examination of disciplinary acknowledgements in addition to authorship was a strength as it provided us another way of recognising contributors to the papers.

Some limitations of our study include the fact that we only included articles from 5 journals, and as we focused on authorship since 2011 we may have missed earlier trends in joint working within gerontology prior to this. Our methodology may not have identified all interdisciplinarity as we did an analysis of self-declared affiliations/disciplines rather than a textual analysis of papers for evidence of joint-working in the content rather than in the author list or acknowledgements.

Different journals had different details of affiliation/discipline therefore our categorisation and recognition of interdisciplinarity was limited by this. In addition to this, not all listed affiliations were clearly associated with an academic discipline, and thus were recorded as unspecified.

By categorising the authors’ different affiliations under the broad headings ‘Arts/Humanities,’ ‘Gerontology/Age Studies,’ and ‘Unspecified,’ we may have missed cross-disciplinary authorship within these categories.

Our study indicates that single authorship is the most frequent mode of peer-reviewed publishing in cultural gerontology, while acknowledging that some authors may have scholarly training in multiple fields but are listed as unidisciplinary. There will always be a role and need for single authorship papers however we believe it is likely that more collaborative styles will increase the quality and range of papers published within gerontology. Leaders in the field and editors of relevant journals/sections need to consider ways of encouraging and recognising joint working, through fuller descriptions of multiple affiliations, brief author biographies, fuller use of acknowledgements and consideration of brief accompanying discussant responses from complementary disciplines.

Conflict of initerest statement: the authors declare no conflict of interest

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Editorial decision: Minor revisions
31 Jul, 2024
Reviewers agreed at journal
13 Jul, 2024
Reviewers invited by journal
13 Jul, 2024
Editor assigned by journal
12 Jul, 2024
First submitted to journal
08 Jul, 2024

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Interdisciplinarity in cultural gerontology and geriatric medical humanities – a bibliometric survey

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