A practical guideline how to tackle interdisciplinarity—A synthesis from a post-graduate group project

Abstract

The comprehensive understanding of increasingly complex global challenges, such as climate change induced sea level rise demands for interdisciplinary research groups. As a result, there is an increasing interest of funding bodies to support interdisciplinary research initiatives. Attempts for interdisciplinary research in such programs often end in research between closely linked disciplines. This is often due to a lack of understanding about how to work interdisciplinarily as a group. Useful practical guidelines have been provided to overcome existing barriers during interdisciplinary integration. Working as an interdisciplinary research group becomes particularly challenging at the doctoral student level. This study reports findings of an interdisciplinary group project in which a group of doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers from various disciplines faced the challenges of reconciling natural, social, and legal aspects of a fictional coastal environmental problem. The research group went through three phases of interdisciplinary integration: (1) comparing disciplines, (2) understanding disciplines, and (3) thinking between disciplines. These phases finally resulted in the development of a practical guideline, including five concepts of interactive integration. A reflective analysis with observations made in existing literature about interdisciplinary integration further supported the feasibility of the practical guideline. It is intended that this practical guideline may help others to leave out pitfalls and to gain a more successful application of interdisciplinarity in their training.

Menarche Menstruation Menopause and Mental Health (4M): a consortium facilitating interdisciplinary research at the intersection of menstrual and mental health

“…A second key challenge is in maintaining the interdisciplinary nature of the consortium. As with most research that aims to be interdisciplinary, there is a risk that researchers will retreat to their disciplinary silos or work only with those from closely linked disciplines 27 . Interdisciplinarity is one of the key values of 4M and previous research has shown that it is positively associated with research impact 28 .…”

A Life Cycle for Modeling Biology at Different Scales

“…Choosing the form of the equations will impose assumptions on the result that should not be forgotten when interpreting the solution (see Case Studies for examples of valid and overstretching conclusions). For a classically trained plant biologist, this is a great opportunity to explore establishing an interdisciplinary (Palmer, 2018) collaboration or further mathematical training (Bak-Maier and Inger, 2007;Kluger and Bartzke, 2020).…”

“…Interdisciplinary collaborations with mathematicians and statisticians are an invaluable solution to this lack of knowledge. However, careful communication must be maintained between collaborators to make sure the original biological question does not become lost in the details (Bak-Maier and Inger, 2007;Palmer, 2018;Kluger and Bartzke, 2020). Biologists are often competent users of specific programs that model processes of interest with a general understanding of how these models relate to others, yet knowledge gaps remain that can lead to the misinterpretation of the model or a lack of knowledge of field standards for applying certain formalisms.…”

Concept maps to enable interdisciplinary research in cross-domain fusion

“…One of the most prominent examples of interdisciplinary research is the effect of climate change on the coastal environment. It spans over and integrates disciplines such as atmospheric science and oceanography, biological consequences, economic interests, societal concerns, legal commitments, political action, as well as ethical implications [4].…”