Interdisciplinary and Sub-discipline Aspects

Just looking at the journal titles in the last post, one quickly realizes that there is a lot of cross discipline and sub-discipline research being performed here. Today, some of the references lists included in Dr. Medina's publications were scanned to see what science literature she explores and cites to get a better grasp of what her information needs were when writing/researching. A "short list" of those branches of science she explored to help in her research is:

• genetics/genomics
• computational biology
• molecular biology/ zoology
  
• zoology/biology/malacology (study of mullusks)
  
• oceanography/ marine biology
• ecology
• behavioral and neural biology/ neurophysiology
  
• biogeography
• paleobiology
• microbiology

Scanning this list, one notices that most of these branches are often closely related and the lines between them can often times be very smudged and gray. Universities tend to incorporate similar fields into a single department making them even closer related. Which, if you think about it, this cross discipline research usually is a good thing. If scientists did not use knowledge from other fields they would most definitely miss something or underestimate a variable's influence. However, this cooperation may make finding proper, pertinent information harder or require more intense research in order to cover all the bases. The researcher must figure out if there is anything they should or "need to know" about the basics before they can utilize specialist's information that is narrow in scope and super specific. This means that they may need broad coverage materials also, to build up a varied background knowledge.