How Transdisciplinary is Design? An Analysis Using Citation Networks

This article reveals how citation networks can be used to understand and demonstrate the ways design serves to integrate other bodies of knowledge. Analysis focused on two corpuses of peer-reviewed journal articles, representing two bodies of knowledge. The first corpus consisted of 277 articles with the words “Design Thinking” in title. The second corpus contained 296 articles with the words “Network Science” in the title. Paper citation and document co-citation networks of individual and combined corpuses were analyzed. The overlap of paper citation networks was used to synthesize similarities, differences, and opportunities for further integration.