Integration and Implementation Insights
A community blog and repository of resources for improving research impact on complex real-world problems
By Gabriele Bammer
What are the indicators that transdisciplinarity has been institutionalised? How close is it? What still needs to be done to achieve institutionalisation?
Transdisciplinary teaching and research are becoming more common in universities and a range of research organisations. So how will we know that transdisciplinarity is an integral and accepted part of the research and higher education scene, nationally and internationally?
I suggest that there are two primary criteria:
By Gabriele Bammer
The first empirical support for a long-standing complaint by interdisciplinary researchers was recently published in the leading journal Nature. The Australian National University’s Lindell Bromham, Russell Dinnage and Xia Hua showed that interdisciplinary research is less likely to be funded than discipline-based research proposals (Nature, 534, 684–687 (30 June), DOI: 10.1038/nature18315).
They cleverly applied a technique from evolutionary biology that examines relatedness between biological lineages, using a hierarchical classification of research fields rather than an evolutionary tree. The relative representation of different field of research codes and their degree of difference were used as a proxy measure for interdisciplinarity.
The results, based on 5 years of data from the Australian Research Council’s Discovery program, are robust and are unaffected when number of collaborators, primary research field and type of institution are taken into account.
What does it mean?