Investigating the application of work–energy metaphor in interdisciplinary citation analysis

Metaphors play a crucial role in facilitating the comprehension and analysis of knowledge. “Knowledge as energy” is a well-established metaphorical framework that provides unique benefits for comprehending the dissemination of knowledge and enabling its quantification. Nevertheless, empirical studies employing this framework are limited, especially in the area of the work–energy metaphor, which primarily remains theoretical. This paper proposes an application scheme for the work– energy metaphor in interdisciplinary citation analysis. In this scheme, disciplines are considered entities; various factors that drive the progress of a discipline are considered forces; energy is considered the knowledge produced or transferred in the citations. Building upon the work–energy theorem in physics, this study developed indicators reflecting citation quality and velocity to assess interdisciplinary research progression. An empirical investigation was carried out, utilizing these indicators to evaluate the influence of interdisciplinary citations on disciplines. In the experiments, we used Library and Information Science (LIS) from 2012 to 2021 as an example to analyze the impact of interdisciplinary citations from LIS on other disciplines over two time periods. The experiments demonstrated the feasibility of the work–energy metaphorical framework proposed in this paper. It was also found that Computer Science, Management, and Business experienced the highest impact from LIS interdisciplinary citations and exhibited steady growth over a 10-year period. Environmental Science has substantial potential for the future.