Sciencenet.cn is the leading online portal serving the Chinese scientific community. This paper intends to analyze the interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary knowledge communication patterns based on friends-list links in the blog community at Sciencenet.cn by using hyperlink analysis and social network analysis. The major findings are: 1) More bloggers have an academic background in management science and life science; 2) there are some core actors in co-inlink network and co-outlink network, who take the lead in engaging with knowledge exchange activities and produce a great influence on interdisciplinary communication; 3) interactive relationships commonly exist between a blogger and those on his/her friends list, and the most linked-to blogs usually play a key role in generating interactive communication; 4) management science has the highest co-inlink count with life science or information science and it has the highest co-outlink count with life science or mathematical and physical science; 5) management science and life science have the greatest impact on information science and the interdisciplinary knowledge communication will also produce relatively significant influence on the development of information science discipline. It is our hope that this research can serve as a reference source for the future studies of academic virtual communities, and the development of mechanisms for facilitating increased engagement in knowledge exchange activities in academic virtual communities.
