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Interdisciplinary research: Connotation, measurement and impact
Zhang Lin, Sun Beibei, Huang Ying
2020, 41(7):
279-288.
The increasing complexity of challenges involved in scientific progress demands ever more frequent application of capabilities and knowledge from different scientific fields. Facing the complexity, comprehensiveness, and integration of significant social problems, important research ideas often transcend the scope of a single discipline or program. Thus, interdisciplinary research (IDR) has increasingly become an indispensable research paradigm to solve the critical challenges of social development, various policy and funding initiatives also have been developed to encourage IDR.Under such a circumstance, the attention from government, academia, and the public gradually urge us to address the following questions related to IDR, such as what is the real IDR? How to measure the interdisciplinarity of IDR? How to evaluate the impact of IDR? Starting from the concept and connotation of IDR, this paper provides a brief analysis of the questions mentioned above. IDR measures are summarized from two perspectives of disciplinary diversity and coherence. Problems in IDR evaluations are also analyzed from the perspective of citation and societal impact.Despite the growing attention IDR has received, there is a lack of objective consensus in the literature as to the definition of "interdisciplinary ". In this paper, we firstly discussed the specific connotation of IDR, and discriminated interdisciplinary related terms such as multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary which have generated considerable scholarly debate.As a general belief, IDR has a positive influence on breakthroughs and outcomes that promote economic growth or answer social needs. Hence, measurements and evaluations of IDR related research are of great significance for policymakers, fund providers, research managers, and science sociologists to detect and understand the phenomenon of interdisciplinary research. Actually, due to the complexity of interdisciplinarity, defining a unique and absolute measure of IDR is a big challenge. Through a comprehensive review of studies on interdisciplinarity, we found that the approaches to understanding and measuring IDR can be classified into two perspectives: knowledge flow and scientific cooperation. From the first perspective, quantitative measures include citation analysis, co-occurrence analysis of keywords etc. What′s more, the interdisciplinary degree of collaboration can also be measured through the co-authorship of scientists from diverse disciplines. Generally, Proxy indicators created in previous research are mainly concentrated on two perspectives: disciplinary diversity measures and network coherence. Diversity indicators are usually used to measure the heterogeneity of the documentation set, while coherence indicators are used to reveal the structural cohesion of the knowledge network. Diversity mainly explores the number of disciplines, the degree of knowledge integration and the disparity among disciplines involved, while coherence mainly explores the degree of cohesion and the relationships between disciplines. The IDR indicators are reviewed systematically from the two perspectives above in this paper. Actually, interdisciplinarity is a complex and multidimensional concept. It is difficult to describe its essential characteristics comprehensively from any single-dimensional perspective. Most previous studies have analyzed interdisciplinarity from one dimension, lacking an overall and systematic perspective. On the basis of existing research, exploring the differences, advantages and limitations of methods in different dimensions can help conduct a deeper and comprehensive multi-dimensional analysis of interdisciplinary research.Compared with traditional single domain research, the evaluation of interdisciplinary research is more complicated. It is argued that one should not draw the conclusion that overall science would "improve" if research were more interdisciplinary. Evidence on whether IDR is more or less "successful" is scarce, messy and inconclusive. How to effectively evaluate the effects and impacts of IDR became an important question which attracted many scholars′ attention. Considering the objectivity and operability, citation metrics is most frequently used to describe the impact of IDR research in informetrics and scientometrics. However, these qualitative or quantitative evaluations also have some solid limits. In the context of globalization, the government and public′s expectations that scientific research could enhance the competitiveness have continued to increase. Societal impact has gradually become an important part of scientific evaluation. In addition, as a result of the advent of online social media technologies, more and more scientists and those interested in science more and more intend to discuss scientific results on social media platform like Twitter, Mendeley, Facebook etc. Comparing to traditional metrics, the data available on social media platforms provides an easy-to-access source for statistical analysis, which is eagerly adopted by the research community. Firstly, we systematically reviewed previous research on IDR impact. Moreover, taking the development of the pill of oral contraceptive as an example, this paper graphically illustrates the complexity of IDR outcomes′ development path and impact evaluation, challenges in assessing the impacts of IDR are also concluded: Firstly, the relationships between research and innovation inputs, activities, outputs, and impacts are often unclear or nonlinear, and it is difficult or even impossible to separate the impact of IDR from other inputs and activities. Then, the impacts of IDR are realized both in the short and long-term, data related to many issues are unobservable or are not systematically collected. Finally, the impacts of IDR are international by nature - activities and value chains are global, and both positive and negative spillovers exist. Finally, this paper illustrates the important role of IDR from both scientific function and social function. Looking into the future, there are still many problems to be explored in IDR. The existing challenges of IDR and suggestions for future efforts are summarized as follows: Firstly, exploring the structural characteristics and integration models of IDR by combining data from more diverse sources and information of different types. Secondly, understanding the scope and characteristics of IDR impact from a multidimensional perspective. Thirdly, evaluating IDR outputs, persons, teams and projects from both of qualitative and quantitative methods.During the past decades, the phenomenon of increasing interdisciplinarity in research, most notably in new emerging fields has gained paramount importance. This paper provides a systematical summary of IDR research progress, and the research frontiers of IDR are also prospected, which will contribute to a deeper understanding of interdisciplinarity, and provide some reference to the decision-making management mechanism and scientific policy in favor of interdisciplinarity.
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