  The features of collaboration patterns are often considered to be different
from discipline to discipline. Meanwhile, collaborating among disciplines is an
obvious feature emerged in modern scientific research, which incubates several
interdisciplines. The features of collaborations in and among the disciplines
of biological, physical and social sciences are analyzed based on 52,803 papers
published in a multidisciplinary journal PNAS during 1999 to 2013. From those
data, we found similar transitivity and assortativity of collaboration patterns
as well as the identical distribution type of collaborators per author and that
of papers per author, namely a mixture of generalized Poisson and power-law
distributions. In addition, we found that interdisciplinary research is
undertaken by a considerable fraction of authors, not just those with many
collaborators or those with many papers. This case study provides a window for
understanding aspects of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary collaboration
patterns.
