Inter-field studies and interdisciplinarity in research articles in Iranian linguistics

In spite of the significance of interdisciplinary studies throughout the world, the nature and trend of interdisciplinarity seems to be under-researched in Iranian linguistics. To address the issue, the authors of the present study attempted to investigate this trend quantitatively. The corpus of the study includes 1859 articles from 47 peer-reviewed journals. Taking the article titles, their keywords and sometimes their body into account, the articles were classified into 15 fields and/or 7 interdisciplinary areas. The number of inter-field or interdisciplinary articles, calculated as 1353 (73%), suggested that like other sciences in the world, Iranian linguistics is undergoing an interdisciplinarity process. 'Syntax' and 'Literature & Linguistic's were identified as the most frequent and the most influential fields subject to interdisciplinarity respectively. The intersection of the fields and interdisciplinaries indicates that the interaction between the field 'discourse analysi's and the interdisciplinary 'Literature & Linguistic's is the highest in the corpus. The affiliation of the article's authors showed that they are from 127 universities and/or educational and research-based institutions. The share of universities is completely unbalanced, as the faculty members and students of 10 universities have contributed 72 percent of the corpus articles. With respect to the time variable, it is confirmed that the degree of interdisciplinarity has grown significantly within past 25 years.