Interdisciplinary Relationships Between Biological and Physical Sciences

Abstract: Several interdisciplinary areas have appeared at the interface between biological and physical sciences. In this work, we suggest a complex network-based methodology for analyzing the interrelationships between some of these interdisciplinary areas, including Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Biochemistry, among others. This approach has been applied over respective data derived from Wikipedia. Related reviews from the scientific literature are also considered as a reference, yielding a respective bipartite hypergraph which can be used to gain insights about the interrelationships underlying the considered interdisciplinary areas. Several interesting results are obtained, including greater interconnection between the considered interdisciplinary areas with biological than with physical sciences. A good agreement was also found between the network obtained from Wikipedia and the interrelationships revealed by the literature reviews. At the same time, the former network was found to exhibit more intricate relationships than in the hypergraph derived from the literature review.