Outline of academic disciplines

An academic discipline or field of study is a branch of knowledge, taught and researched as part of higher education. A scholar's discipline is commonly defined by the university faculties and learned societies to which they belong and the academic journals in which they publish research.

Part of a series on
Research
Research design Research proposal Research question Writing Argument Referencing
Research strategy Interdisciplinary Multimethodology Qualitative Art-based Quantitative
Methodology Action research Art methodology Critical theory Feminism Grounded theory Hermeneutics Historiography Narrative inquiry Phenomenology Pragmatism Scientific method
Methods Case study Content analysis Descriptive statistics Discourse analysis Ethnography Autoethnography Experiment Field experiment Social experiment Quasi-experiment Field research Historical method Inferential statistics Interviews Mapping Cultural mapping Phenomenography Secondary research Bibliometrics Literature review Meta-analysis Scoping review Systematic review Scientific modelling Simulation Survey
Tools and software Argument technology Geographic information system software Library and information science software Bibliometrics Reference management Science software Qualitative data analysis Simulation Statistics
Philosophy portal
v t e

Disciplines vary between well-established ones that exist in almost all universities and have well-defined rosters of journals and conferences, and nascent ones supported by only a few universities and publications. A discipline may have branches, and these are often called sub-disciplines.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to academic disciplines. In each case an entry at the highest level of the hierarchy (e.g., Humanities) is a group of broadly similar disciplines; an entry at the next highest level (e.g., Music) is a discipline having some degree of autonomy and being the basic identity felt by its scholars; and lower levels of the hierarchy are sub-disciplines not normally having any role in the structure of the university's governance.