“One Health” or Three? Publication Silos Among the One Health Disciplines

The One Health initiative is a global effort fostering interdisciplinary collaborations to address challenges in human, animal, and environmental health. While One Health has received considerable press, its benefits remain unclear because its effects have not been quantitatively described. We syste...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PLoS biology 2016-04, Vol.14 (4), p.e1002448
Main Authors: Manlove, Kezia R, Walker, Josephine G, Craft, Meggan E, Huyvaert, Kathryn P, Joseph, Maxwell B, Miller, Ryan S, Nol, Pauline, Patyk, Kelly A, O'Brien, Daniel, Walsh, Daniel P, Cross, Paul C
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Authorship
Biology and Life Sciences
Collaboration
Cooperative Behavior
Ecologists
Ecology
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Environmental health
Federal funding
Generalized linear models
Infectious diseases
Interdisciplinary aspects
Interdisciplinary research
Medical research
Medicine and Health Sciences
Meta
Methods
Objectives
Publishing
Researchers
Scholarly publishing
Social network analysis
Social networks
Studies
Veterinarians
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Summary:The One Health initiative is a global effort fostering interdisciplinary collaborations to address challenges in human, animal, and environmental health. While One Health has received considerable press, its benefits remain unclear because its effects have not been quantitatively described. We systematically surveyed the published literature and used social network analysis to measure interdisciplinarity in One Health studies constructing dynamic pathogen transmission models. The number of publications fulfilling our search criteria increased by 14.6% per year, which is faster than growth rates for life sciences as a whole and for most biology subdisciplines. Surveyed publications clustered into three communities: one used by ecologists, one used by veterinarians, and a third diverse-authorship community used by population biologists, mathematicians, epidemiologists, and experts in human health. Overlap between these communities increased through time in terms of author number, diversity of co-author affiliations, and diversity of citations. However, communities continue to differ in the systems studied, questions asked, and methods employed. While the infectious disease research community has made significant progress toward integrating its participating disciplines, some segregation—especially along the veterinary/ecological research interface—remains.
ISSN:1545-7885
1544-9173
1545-7885
DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002448