As opportunities to gamble and play lotteries have increased during the 20th century, so has gambling research. This study used new strategies, methods, and technology to examine citation trends and the growth of knowledge in the field of gambling studies. By using multiple keywords to classify each citation into distinct topic areas, this study yielded a more comprehensive analysis than was previously available. In the last three decades, there have been studies claiming that gambling and lottery studies are becoming ever more interdisciplinary. However, the evidence has been anecdotal or partial. Here for the first time, we investigate a large size citation network of gambling and lotteries with the intention to develop an automated unsupervised classification model that can efficiently distinguish the core and the interdisciplinary research fields using technology of big data analysis.

For this purpose, we used text mining and network analysis in technologies of big data. The significance of each of these features in characterizing inter-disciplinary study is measured independently and then systematically accumulated to build an unsupervised classification model. The result of the classification model shows several distinctive clusters that clearly distinguish core and interdisciplinary fields of gambling and lotteries. Based on this classification, we further study the evolution dynamics at a macro-level to show how interdisciplinary study emerges through cross-fertilization of ideas between the fields that otherwise have little overlap as they are mostly studied independently.

Finally, to understand the overall impact of interdisciplinary research on the entire domain, we analyze selective citation-based measurements of core and interdisciplinary fields; paper submission and acceptance statistics at top-tier conferences; the core-periphery structure of citation network; and observe an increasing impact of the interdisciplinary fields along with their steady integration with the gamble and lottery in recent times. As a result, we can see the necessity of unique curriculum for gambling and lotteries through wide and deep professional studies in their own domain.