Proposal for the Use of the Input-Output Approach in the Analysis of the Structure of Interdisciplinary Relationships

There exists a close similarity between the input-output structure of a national economy and the structure of the system of scientific knowledge. The flow of commodities between the different disciplines is analogous to the flow of goods and services between industries. The so-called citation indexes listing the subjects of articles published in different scientific journals and references made in them to articles published in other journals can be used to construct input-output tables describing the interrelationship between the creation and use of different scientific ideas.