How to overcome the challenges of multidisciplinary research?

Multidisciplinary research involves integrating knowledge, methods, and perspectives from different disciplines to address a common research question or meta-problem. Multidisciplinary research is not new and has been practised for ages. Multidisciplinary areas are interrelated and interdependent. Historically, many scholars have adequately addressed such problems by engaging in work that spanned multiple disciplines.

The emergence of modern fields such as biotechnology and astrophysics is the result of combining multiple disciplines. In the 20th century, it has become more structured, with institutions and universities fostering collaboration across disciplines to address complex real-world problems (Ramani & Sikdar, 2023).

Governments and funding bodies recognize the value of multidisciplinary research in driving innovation and solving societal problems, leading to increased support and resources. The National Education Policy of 2020, emphasizes the need to retrain educators, enhance their skills, and attract top candidates to academia. It also encourages greater collaboration between Indian and international institutions, aiming to elevate the overall quality of higher education in India (Com, 2020).

American institutions like the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) have emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary research. The US government agencies and private foundations provide substantial funding for multidisciplinary projects. The US also leads in the number of publications and citations related to multidisciplinary research. Many US institutions have restructured their educational programs to encourage interdisciplinary learning, creating environments where students and researchers can easily cross disciplinary boundaries (Braun & Schubert, 2007).

Challenges and obstacles faced

Despite its advantages and increased emphasis on promoting multidisciplinary research, there have been notable challenges and obstacles that make it difficult to secure support for projects. The notion of quality is a central theme in the evaluation of interdisciplinary research. Quality is seen as an explicit measure recently introduced in specific funding systems. However, the use of quality as a criterion can potentially suppress multidisciplinary research, as the established disciplinary quality standards are likely to prevail. Managing the biases that can arise from the clash of disciplinary perspectives in the evaluation process is a challenge (Laudel & Origgi, 2006).

Domain-specific practices are often opaque to outsiders, making it difficult for researchers from different fields to understand and integrate each other’s methods (Turner, 2000). Researchers from different disciplines have varying epistemic values, methodologies, and terminologies, leading to misunderstandings and conflicts that hinder effective collaboration. This lack of a structured problem-solving environment requires researchers to constantly reinvent the wheel, leading to inconsistencies in the research process (MacLeod, 2016). Similarly, working across disciplinary boundaries creates barriers to effective interpersonal communication, requiring each person to be vigilant about how they share knowledge and information with fellow researchers. Furthermore, poor communication leads to a total communication breakdown raising the need for external facilitation to help researchers learn to work together and resolve conflicts within the team (Marzano, Carss, & Bell, 2006).

Traditional metrics, such as publication counts and journal impact factors, often fail to capture the full impact of interdisciplinary research. Furthermore, peer review systems that are crucial for journal publications devalue interdisciplinary contributions. The traditional peer review system is often organized around specific disciplinary journals or funding agencies, creating a fragmented review process for interdisciplinary research (MacLeod, 2016). Evaluators tend to be more conservative and stick to their disciplinary prejudices due to uncertainty from a lack of competence in evaluating non-conventional research. Evaluation of interdisciplinary research is a complex and multifaceted challenge. There is a lack of consensus on the best ways to evaluate interdisciplinary research (Laudel & Origgi, 2006).

How to overcome multidisciplinary research challenges?

Multidisciplinarity requires conscious effort, time, and resources for developing interpersonal relationships and effective communication. It requires the development of discursive collaboration and mutual understanding of different disciplinary perspectives.

Most of the academicians who conduct interdisciplinary work have developed their standards of quality for the evaluation of interdisciplinary research, such as consistency with previous research, balance between interdisciplinary perspectives, and potential effectiveness (Laudel & Origgi, 2006).

Literature on knowledge translation for the end user also indicates that researchers and editors from other fields may not always have the resources or skills to translate interdisciplinary knowledge to the end user, and greater impact could be achieved with knowledge brokers with specific expertise.

However, the mechanisms by which multidisciplinary contributions involving knowledge brokers or editors might be assessed remain unclear. There is a need to reconceptualize the knowledge translation process as a network rather than a linear progression from research to practice (Ross, Nichol, Elliott, Sambrook, & Stewart, 2020).

Successful interdisciplinary collaboration also requires considerable effort at communication in the sense of bringing distinct forms of knowledge production into some sort of fruitful integration (Marzano, Carss, & Bell, 2006). Managing biases and ensuring fair assessment requires clear communication protocols and procedures that facilitate the exchange of ideas and the consideration of interdisciplinary standards of quality. Comparative studies of assessment procedures can be used to identify types of interdisciplinary research and find causal relationships between them and the success of those procedures (Laudel & Origgi, 2006).

Integrating multidisciplinary research at an institutional level

The primary purpose for an institute to engage in multidisciplinary research is that it can provide a vital basis for improving the educational process. Integrating multidisciplinary research at an institutional level requires restructuring of educational programs and, the creation of interdisciplinary learning environments. There is a need to develop policies and practices that provide suitable rewards and incentives for departments and individuals to participate in multidisciplinary research and implement them through administrative commitment, particularly in the budgeting process. The performance of the program should be reviewed by disciplinarians, generalists, and the users of the results, each from their own point of view. This balanced review process should be an aid, not an obstacle, to the effectiveness of the program (Nilles, 1976).

Furthermore, a framework is needed to examine the interested institute’s structural commitment to interdisciplinary research, rather than just their cultural commitment. An institute’s structural commitment should be measured across all fields, rather than just specific fields. This allows for a broader understanding of how this commitment varies across different types of universities (Leahey, Barringer, & Ring Ramirez, 2019).

To address epistemic incompatibilities between disciplines researchers have suggested three frameworks :

• Circumvention by carefully defining the meta-problem and composing the interdisciplinary team to avoid areas of incompatibility.
• Disciplinary synthesis by achieving epistemic convergence through a process of mutual disciplinary discovery, internal reflection, and negotiation to compromise on perceived incompatibilities.
• Epistemic pragmatism by ignoring or discounting apparent disciplinary incompatibilities rather than avoiding or synthesizing them, to allow the research to move forward.

Furthermore, the authors also acknowledge the limitations of the above framework and new research should be made to explore the nuances of these processes and test the applicability of the framework in empirical settings (Dalton, Wolff, & Bekker, 2022).

References

• Braun, T., & Schubert, A. (2007). The growth of research on inter-and multidisciplinarity in science and social science papers, 1975–2006. Scientometrics, 345–351.
• Com B. National Education Policy 2020.
• Dalton, A., Wolff, K., & Bekker, B. (2022). Interdisciplinary Research as a Complicated. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 1-13.
• Laudel, G., & Origgi, G. (2006). Introduction to a special issue on the assessment of interdisciplinary research. Research Evaluation, 2-4.
• Leahey, E., Barringer, S. N., & Ring Ramirez, M. (2019). Universities’ structural commitment to interdisciplinary. Scientometrics, 891-919.
• MacLeod, M. (2016). What makes interdisciplinarity difficult? Some consequences of domain specificity in interdisciplinary practice. Springerlink.com.
• Marzano, M., Carss, D. N., & Bell, S. (2006). Working to Make Interdisciplinarity Work: Investing in Communication and Interpersonal Relationships. Journal of Agricultural Economics, 185-197.
• Nilles, J. M. (1976). Interdisciplinary policy research and the universities. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 79-84.
• Ramani, P., & Sikdar, M. (2023). Multidisciplinary Research Past, Present and Future. International Conference on Multidisciplinary Research & Practice (p. 197). IEEE.
• Ross, C., Nichol, L., Elliott, C., Sambrook, S., & Stewart, J. (2020). From chain to net: assessing interdisciplinary contributions to academic impact through narrative case studies. Studies in Higher Education, Volume 46, 2309-2324.
• Turner, S. (2000). What are Disciplines? And How is Interdisciplinary Different? Practising Interdisciplinarity, University of Toronto Press, 46-65.