Approaches to understanding and measuring interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR): A review of the literature

Wagner, Caroline S.; Roessner, J. David; Bobb, Kamau; Klein, Julie Thompson; Boyack, Kevin W.; Keyton, Joann; Ràfols, Ismael; Börner, Katy

doi:10.1016/j.joi.2010.06.004

Cited by 597 publications

(461 citation statements)

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“…Despite the title of the CINTERA project ("A Cross-Disciplinary ... Approach"), a review [2][3][4][5]7,12,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] of the growing literature on building collaborative projects that transcend academic disciplines reveals that the term "cross-disciplinary" is not much used and is, at best, vaguely defined (For example, Nenseth et al 2010 [7] define "cross-disciplinary" as the borrowing of methods and perspectives by one discipline by another). As it turned out, this term actually fit our project as it was originally conceived, having as it did the goal of bringing together some very different disciplines but leaving the nature of the collaboration a bit open and underspecified.…”

Section: Integrated Research and Cinteramentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1095-1101), [28] (p. 24). Their work suggests that a rough consensus is emerging to designate projects with varying ranges of integration as "multidisciplinary", "interdisciplinary", or "transdisciplinary" [28][29][30][31][32][33]. Multidisciplinary projects have the least degree of integration; they are essentially a set of separate projects gathered under a single project theme but with only some dialogue among the various components at best, perhaps towards the end of the project.…”

Section: Integrated Research and Cinteramentioning

confidence: 99%

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Interdisciplinarity as an Emergent Property: The Research Project “CINTERA” and the Study of Marine Eutrophication

et al. 2015

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Abstract:Research projects combining different disciplines are increasingly common and sought after by funding agencies looking for ways to achieve environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Creating and running a truly integrated research project that combines very different disciplines is, however, no easy task. Large-scale efforts to create interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research efforts have reported on their experiences in OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2015, 7 9119 trying to achieve this goal. This article shares the methods, challenges and achievements experienced by a smaller group of researchers who have developed an interdisciplinary approach based on former results of Norwegian and Chilean experiments. The project "A Cross-disciplinary Integrated Eco-system Eutrophication Research and Management Approach" (CINTERA), funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN, project 216607), brings together the fields of political science, economics, marine biology/oceanography and marine bio-geo-chemistry to improve the understanding of marine eutrophication and its possible socio-economic impacts. CINTERA is a multidisciplinary project that evolved into an interdisciplinary project and in so doing, transformed the attitudes of participants. The transformative process was generated particularly by the need to work closely together in making the CINTERA project useful for policy-makers.

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Section: Integrated Research and Cinteramentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Integrated Research and Cinteramentioning

confidence: 99%

Interdisciplinarity as an Emergent Property: The Research Project “CINTERA” and the Study of Marine Eutrophication

et al. 2015

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“…Maximum citations is received for diversity eight, from then on wards it declines. This may be partly due to average shift towards higher diversity in 1994-2003 compared to 1985-1994. To capture the aggregate trends of diversity and citations, we further grouped the diversity index into three bins {[0, 1, 2], [3,4,5], [6,7,8, 8+]} denoting low, medium and high diversity respectively. The average citations received by these groups of papers from their published year is plotted in Fig.…”

Section: A V E R a G E C I T A T I O N S R E C E I V E D Y E A R S (mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This generated tremendous interest among scientists working in scientometric and bibliometric studies, to understand the evolution of scientific disciplines, measure the impact of articles through citation analysis, discover the pattern of scientific collaboration etc [2], [3], [4]. In recent years, many studies have focused on understanding the interdisciplinarity through variety of approaches [5], [6], [7], [8], and [9], but primarily using citation data and measures based on entropy, simpson index etc [10]. A recent special issue of Nature summarizes the work on measuring interdiscplinarity and tracks the trend in interdisciplinary work across different fields from 1950 onwards [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Diversity of Papers Affect Their Citations? Evidence from American Physical Society Journals

Enduri

Reddy

Jolad

2015

2015 11th International Conference on Signal-Image Technology &Amp; Internet-Based Systems (SITIS)

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Abstract-In this work, we study the correlation between interdisciplinarity of papers within physical sciences and their citations by using meta data of articles published in American Physical Society's Physical Review journals between 1985 to 2012. We use the Weitzman diversity index to measure the diversity of papers and authors, exploiting the hierarchical structure of PACS (Physics and Astronomy Classification Scheme) codes. We find that the fraction of authors with high diversity is increasing with time, where as the fraction of least diversity are decreasing, and moderate diversity authors have higher tendency to switch over to other diversity groups. The diversity index of papers is correlated with the citations they received in a given time period from their publication year. Papers with lower and higher end of diversity index receive lesser citations than the moderate diversity papers.

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“…According to the often quoted report of the U.S. Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research for instance, 'Interdisciplinary research (IDR) is a mode of research by teams or individuals that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge ' (National Research Council, 2004, p. 2). The centrality of the epistemic and cognitive dimension of integration is common in the literature on interdisciplinarity (see for instance Miller et al, 2008;Wagner et al, 2011;Green & Wolkenhauer, 2012;Defila & Di Giulio, 2015;Brister, this issue). While institutional and communicative aspects are often examined too (see for instance National Research Council, 2004, Chs.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Practical integration: The art of balancing values, institutions and knowledge – lessons from the History of British Public Health and Town Planning

Grandis

2016

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in

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The paper uses two historical examples, public health (1840-1880) and town planning in Britain, to analyse the challenges faced by goal-driven research, an increasingly important trend in science policy, as exemplified by the prominence of calls for addressing Grand Challenges. Two key points are argued. (1) Given that the aim of research addressing social or global problems is to contribute to improving things, this research should include all the steps necessary to bring science and technology to fruition. This need is captured by the idea of practical integration, which brings this type of research under the umbrella of collective practical reason rather than under the aegis of science. Achieving practical integration is difficult for many reasons: the complexity of social needs, the plurality of values at stake, the limitation of our knowledge, the elusive nature of the skills needed to deal with uncertainty, incomplete information and asymmetries of power. Nevertheless, drawing from the lessons of the case studies, it is argued that (2) practical integration needs a proper balance between values, institutions and knowledge: i.e. a combination of mutual support and mutual limitation. Pursuing such a balance provides a flexible strategy for approximating practical integration. Research for policy-making and practical actionis inevitably conducted in a political context. If research is to be 'useful' it must relate to the art of the possible (Pahl 1975, p. 5) the stakes here are not to make sciences 'progress', but to raise to the challenges facing society (Stengers 2002, p. 98)

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Approaches to understanding and measuring interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR): A review of the literature

Cited by 597 publications

References 45 publications

Interdisciplinarity as an Emergent Property: The Research Project “CINTERA” and the Study of Marine Eutrophication

Interdisciplinarity as an Emergent Property: The Research Project “CINTERA” and the Study of Marine Eutrophication

Does Diversity of Papers Affect Their Citations? Evidence from American Physical Society Journals

Practical integration: The art of balancing values, institutions and knowledge – lessons from the History of British Public Health and Town Planning

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