ABSTRACT
Academic peer-reviewed journals have traditionally been discipline-based, with a strong connection between the establishment of new disciplines and the foundation of academic journals. It then comes as no surprise that many advocates of interdisciplinary research are highly critical of academic discipline-based journals, which they see as hindering the development of breakthrough research, and thus call for the launch of interdisciplinary journals. In this chapter, I question the distinction between disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals as well as the presumed inability of so-called disciplinary journals to keep pace with recent advances in interdisciplinary nanomedicine. I also assess the specific contributions of interdisciplinary nanotechnology journals to the establishment of evaluation criteria for nanomedicine research. Finally, I argue that it is not only discipline-based journals that are under fire for not properly controlling the quality of academic science. Interdisciplinary journals, even the most prestigious ones, do not escape the more general criticism of the crisis in the peer reviewing of academic publications.
