"One Health" or Three? Publication Silos Among the One Health Disciplines

PLoS Biol. 2016 Apr 21;14(4):e1002448. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002448. eCollection 2016 Apr.

Abstract

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Cooperative Behavior*
  • Publishing*

Grants and funding

This work was assisted through author participation in the Interface Disease Models Investigative Workshop at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), sponsored by the National Science Foundation through NSF Award #DBI-1300426, with additional support from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. KRM was supported on a Penn State academic computing fellowship and a Morris Animal Foundation grant (D13ZO-081). JGW was supported by a University of Bristol Postgraduate Research Scholarship. MBJ was supported by the NSF GRFP. DO was supported by the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act under Michigan Pittman-Robertson Project W-147-R. KPH was supported by Colorado State University and USDA Cooperative Agreement #13-9208-0346-CA. MEC was supported by NSF (DEB-1413925) and the Cooperative State Research Service (USDA) under Project Numbers MINV 62-044 and 62-051. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.