iScience · 2023
What makes interdisciplinary research valuable, what makes it difficult, and how can researchers and funders make cross-disciplinary collaboration work?
Mahringer, C. A., Baessler, F., Gerchen, M. F., Haack, C., Jacob, K., & Mayer, S. (2023). Benefits and obstacles of interdisciplinary research: Insights from members of the Young Academy at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. iScience, 26, 108508. 10.1016/j.isci.2023.108508
Interdisciplinary research is widely promoted as a way to address complex scientific and societal problems. Funding agencies increasingly encourage researchers from different disciplines to collaborate, and interdisciplinary work is often associated with creativity, innovation, broader perspectives, and greater societal relevance. Yet collaboration across disciplinary boundaries can also create substantial difficulties because researchers differ in language, methods, assumptions, publication practices, and professional incentives.
This article examines interdisciplinarity from the perspective of researchers who have experienced it directly. Rather than treating interdisciplinary research as inherently beneficial, it considers both its opportunities and its costs. The authors reflect on collaboration across medicine, psychology, physics, history, linguistics, organization studies, neurobiology, and other fields within the Young Academy of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
We ask: What are the benefits and obstacles of interdisciplinary research projects?
The article is structured as a collection of reflections from scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds. These accounts examine personal development, disciplinary learning, knowledge development, communication across specialized languages, creativity and innovation, and academic career implications. Taken together, they provide practice-based guidance for researchers, research managers, funding organizations, and policymakers who design or participate in interdisciplinary collaborations.
Interdisciplinarity is often considered a key element of successful research projects. Funding organizations, for instance, promote interdisciplinarity by making it a key criterion for the selection of projects. While interdisciplinarity is clearly a target of policymakers and funding organizations, it is less clear what the benefits of such projects are and how they can be successfully conducted. Drawing on experiences within the Young Academy of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the article reflects on the benefits and obstacles of interdisciplinary research and offers guidance for scientists, policymakers, and funding organizations.
The article shows that interdisciplinary research can generate learning, creativity, and societal relevance, but these benefits depend on researchers’ ability to bridge disciplinary differences and on institutional conditions that allow unexpected ideas to develop.
Working across disciplinary boundaries can broaden researchers’ perspectives, make hidden assumptions within their own fields more visible, and sharpen disciplinary research profiles. Exposure to unfamiliar theories, methods, and ways of reasoning creates opportunities for personal development, mutual learning, and new scientific perspectives.
Different disciplines use different concepts, languages, norms, and standards of evidence. Effective interdisciplinary collaboration therefore requires more than exchanging information. Researchers must explain how their disciplines interpret problems, negotiate meanings, develop shared language, and coordinate different disciplinary cultures in order to avoid misunderstandings.
Interdisciplinary collaboration can create unexpected connections and open new intellectual spaces that were not anticipated when a project began. Funding arrangements that provide commitment while preserving flexibility can help researchers pursue these emerging possibilities. At the same time, interdisciplinarity can create publication, evaluation, and career challenges, particularly for early-career researchers.
The article contributes to discussions of interdisciplinarity, team science, knowledge integration, scientific collaboration, innovation, and academic careers by showing how these issues are experienced in actual interdisciplinary projects. It highlights that collaboration across disciplines is not simply a matter of combining expertise, but involves learning how different scientific communities define problems, communicate, evaluate evidence, and develop knowledge.
It also suggests that the innovative potential of interdisciplinarity is inherently difficult to predict. New research questions can emerge during collaboration rather than being fully specified in advance, which makes flexibility an important condition for interdisciplinary discovery.
Interdisciplinary projects need more than a funding requirement that several disciplines participate. Researchers need time to develop shared language, understand different assumptions, build trust, and identify productive connections. Funders and research leaders should therefore avoid treating interdisciplinarity as an end in itself and instead ask what scientific or societal goals collaboration across disciplines is intended to achieve.
Project structures should also leave room for unexpected research directions. Strict adherence to initial proposals can suppress precisely the novel ideas interdisciplinary collaboration is expected to generate. At the same time, institutions should recognize the additional communication effort, publication uncertainty, and career risks that interdisciplinary work can create for researchers.
