Abstract Revealing interdisciplinary patterns is a cornerstone for the continued evolution of research, education, and societal progress, providing a scaffold upon which to build a more collaborative and integrated approach to knowledge creation. This study presents a novel approach to identifying and analyzing the critical year for interdisciplinary citations (CYIC), which was defined as the year in which qualitative change in interdisciplinary knowledge flow occurred. We conducted two experiments using a Chinese paper dataset spanning 106 disciplines from 1992 to 2022, with the first to pinpoint the occurrence of CYICs and the second to examine three patterns of interdisciplinarity following these CYICs. Our findings revealed that 85% of disciplines exhibit CYICs, often corresponding with a transition from unidirectional output to reciprocal knowledge cooperation. Furthermore, we found that datasets after CYICs are generally characterized by increased interdisciplinarity of knowledge, albeit without a corresponding rise in the interdisciplinarity of disciplines or interdisciplinary diversity. Our results suggest that policy shifts and societal needs are pivotal in driving the formation of interdisciplinary collaborations, as exemplified by the surge in mutual interdisciplinary citations in response to China's poverty alleviation efforts and western development policies.

This study investigates the content of questions and responses about the Zika virus on Yahoo! Answers as a recent example of how public concerns regarding an international health issue are reflected in social media. We investigate the contents of posts about the Zika virus on Yahoo! Answers, identify and reveal subject patterns about the Zika virus, and analyze the temporal changes of the revealed subject topics over 4 defined periods of the Zika virus outbreak. Multidimensional scaling analysis, temporal analysis, and inferential statistical analysis approaches were used in the study. A resulting 2‐layer Zika virus schema, and term connections and relationships are presented. The results indicate that consumers’ concerns changed over the 4 defined periods. Consumers paid more attention to the basic information about the Zika virus, and the prevention and protection from the Zika virus at the beginning of the outbreak of the Zika virus. During the later periods, consumers became more interested in the role that the government and health organizations played in the public health emergency.

Relevance judgment plays an extremely significant role in information retrieval. This study investigates the differences between American users and Chinese users in relevance judgment during the information retrieval process. 384 sets of relevance scores with 50 scores in each set were collected from 16 American users and 16 Chinese users as they judged retrieval records from two major search engines based on 24 predefined search tasks from 4 domain categories. Statistical analyses reveal that there are significant differences between American assessors and Chinese assessors in relevance judgments. Significant gender differences also appear within both the American and the Chinese assessor groups. The study also revealed significant interactions among cultures, genders, and subject categories. These findings can enhance the understanding of cultural impact on information retrieval and can assist in the design of effective cross-language information retrieval systems.

This article describes how as internet technology continues to change and improve lives and societies worldwide, effective global information management becomes increasingly critical, and effective Internet information retrieval systems become more and more significant in providing Internet users worldwide with accurate and complete information. Search engine evaluation is an important research field as search engines directly determine the quality of information users' Internet searches. Relevance-decrease pattern/model plays an important role in search engine result evaluation. This research studies effective measurement of search results through investigating relevance-decrease patterns of search results from two popular search engines: Google and Bing. The findings can be applied to relevance-evaluation of search results from other information retrieval systems such as OPAC, can help make search engine evaluations more accurate and sound, and can provide global information management personnel with valuable insights.

The number of research studies on social tagging has increased rapidly in the past years, but few of them highlight the characteristics and research trends in social tagging. A set of 862 academic documents relating to social tagging and published from 2005 to 2011 was thus examined using bibliometric analysis as well as the social network analysis technique. The results show that social tagging, as a research area, develops rapidly and attracts an increasing number of new entrants. There are no key authors, publication sources, or research groups that dominate the research domain of social tagging. Research on social tagging appears to focus mainly on the following three aspects: (a) components and functions of social tagging (e.g., tags, tagging objects, and tagging network), (b) taggers' behaviors and interface design, and (c) tags' organization and usage in social tagging. The trend suggest that more researchers turn to the latter two integrated with human computer interface and information retrieval, although the first aspect is the fundamental one in social tagging. Also, more studies relating to social tagging pay attention to multimedia tagging objects and not only text tagging. Previous research on social tagging was limited to a few subject domains such as information science and computer science. As an interdisciplinary research area, social tagging is anticipated to attract more researchers from different disciplines. More practical applications, especially in high‐tech companies, is an encouraging research trend in social tagging.