Many complex problems and emerging phenomena require joint research efforts across academic disciplines. Interdisciplinary research (IDR) is therefore widely considered a promising approach to knowledge production. This paper reviews the literature on IDR from the perspective of individual researchers engaging in or considering this type of research.

In many sectors and in many respects, interdisciplinarity has made progress in recent decades, but less so when it comes to evaluating interdisciplinary work. Challenges remain, especially regarding what counts as ‘good’ interdisciplinarity.

This paper analyses the interrelations between academic disciplines and society beyond academia by the case of sociology in Norway. 

This paper presents several suggestions for future measurement of the interdisciplinarity of research. 

Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. This article looks at a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration.

In this paper we discuss interdisciplinarity through data as a way to create research environments that are more flexible and, as a result, more amenable to change. We report our findings from facilitating and evaluating a data-oriented early-career fellowship program that was administered as part of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), a global organization that aims to enable open sharing and re-use of data. 

Novelty indicators are increasingly important for science policy. This paper challenges the indicators of novelty as an atypical combination of knowle…

Scientists influenced by funding priorities promoted by regional, national and transnational funding bodies, as well as by the academic mania for ‘interdisciplinariness’, feel compelled to develop a concrete interdisciplinary research topic and organize their research collaboratively.

For interdisciplinary projects to flourish, scientists must recognise the potential contribution of other disciplines in answering key research questions. Recent research suggested that social sciences may be appreciated less than hard sciences overall.

Despite the growing interdisciplinarity of research, the Nobel prize consolidates the traditional disciplinary categorization of science. There is, in fact, an opportunity for the most revered scientific reward to mirror the current research landscape.

The present paper takes its place in the stream of studies that analyze the effect of interdisciplinarity on the impact of research output. Unlike previous studies, in this study the...

While rates of productivity were broadly similar, citation rates were found to be higher for transdisciplinary students, as were indicators of collaboration such as co-authorship.

The Interdisciplinary Research Collection highlights 11 articles that exemplify the diversity of interdisciplinary research published in PLOS ONE.