The Medical statistics theme is connected to psychology and the social sciences, which is understandable given the similarity in the statistical techniques that are used. Various extensions of the analysis presented in this paper are possible. For instance, in the textual approach, the role played by EPS research in HLS fields could be investigated in more detail by making a classification of EPS-related terms into a number of different types. In the citation-based approach, a challenging extension would be to search for citation patterns that provide evidence of structural knowledge flows between fields, or perhaps even between series of fields, for instance from physics to chemistry to the life sciences to medicine. Another possible extension would be to systematically monitor how different fields of science depend on each other, how these dependencies evolve over time, and how they influence the emergence of new interdisciplinary research areas. Within this context, the GDC-0199 contribution made by different countries to research areas at the boundary between disciplines could be monitored as well, and with the improving availability of funding data in bibliographic databases, also the role played by individual funding agencies could be analyzed. The availability of genome sequences from a large number of organisms has created a wide-spread need to clone complete sets of open reading frames followed by the expression and purification of the encoded gene products in a high-throughput manner to examine the functions of genes and proteins in organisms. Using a variety of thermostable polymerases, the target ORFs can be efficiently amplified by polymerase chain reaction with virtually no errors. However, high efficiency and highthroughput cloning of amplified products into a suitable expression vector still remains an arduous task. An ideal high-throughput cloning method should include a minimal number of steps without the need for intermediate purification and preferably be performed in the same tube in which the gene-of interest was amplified. Traditional methods such as restriction enzyme-based strategies cannot be considered suitable for the high-throughput cloning of a large set of different ORFs due to the presence of numerous restriction enzyme sites within the ORF sequences. As an alternative, the commonly used TA cloning methodology is simple, but lacks directionality in cloning and requires the inserts to be amplified using enzymes that have template-independent terminal transferase activity; these polymerases have a low fidelity resulting in mutations in the amplified DNA. Different formats of the ligation-independent cloning method have been described for efficient high-throughput cloning.