Versioning boundary objects: the citation profile of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM)

This content is not available in the selected language.

Purpose
Research objects, such as datasets and classification standards, are difficult to be incorporated into a document-centric framework of citations, which relies on unique citable works. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorder (DSM)—a dominant classification scheme used for mental disorder diagnosis—however provides a unique lens on examining citations to a research object, given that it straddles the boundaries as a single research object with changing manifestations.

Design/methodology/approach
Using over 180,000 citations received by the DSM, this paper analyzes how the citation history of DSM is represented by its various versions, and how it is cited in different knowledge domains as an important boundary object.

Findings
It shows that all recent DSM versions exhibit a similar citation cascading pattern, which is characterized by a strong replacement effect between two successive versions. Moreover, the shift of the disciplinary contexts of DSM citations can be largely explained by different DSM versions as distinct epistemic objects.

This content has been updated on October 28th, 2022 at 10 h 56 min.