Three lessons from statistics for interdisciplinarians and fellow travellers

By Gabriele Bammer

gabriele-bammer
Gabriele Bammer (biography)

In last week’s blog post on recognising interdisciplinary expertise I argued that forming a new i2S discipline could help embed interdisciplinarity and related approaches (transdisciplinarity, systems thinking, action research, T-shaped research and others) in the academic mainstream. But how would such a discipline work? What are the challenges to establishing an i2S discipline and how could they be overcome?

The discipline of statistics provides three productive analogies. Key to success in both statistics and i2S are: collaboration, dedicated journals to publish advances in concepts and methods, and lobbying for effective application of the discipline.

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Where to publish? Journals for research integration and implementation concepts, methods and processes

By Gabriele Bammer

gabriele-bammer
Gabriele Bammer (biography)

If you have developed a new dialogue method for bringing together insights from different disciplinary experts and stakeholders, or a refined modelling technique for taking uncertainty into account, or an innovative process for knowledge co-creation with government policy makers, where can you publish these to get maximum exposure and uptake?

Over the past several years, Peter Deane and I have been reviewing journals that publish concepts, methods and processes for:
•    Synthesis of disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge
•    Understanding and managing diverse unknowns
•    Providing integrated research support (combining what we know and don’t know) for policy and practice change.
These are the components of what is referred to in this post as research integration and implementation. We have compiled information about more than 50 journals and regularly make additions (these are publicized bi-monthly in I2S News). We provide a brief synopsis of the journal aims, the most recent Thomson Reuters impact factor, the link to the journal website, and information about relevant special issues.
[Author note December 2022: The compilation of 90+ journals has been relocated to the ITD-Alliance website: https://itd-alliance.org/journals/ and they are no longer publicized in i2S News.]

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