AsianScientist (Jul. 8, 2016) – Bringing together researchers from a range of fields can help solve complex problems, but new research has found interdisciplinary research to be consistently short-changed.
The study, published in Nature, proves the commonly-held view that although interdisciplinary research is often encouraged, it has lower chances of being funded than more narrowly-focused research.
“One of the biggest advantages of interdisciplinary research is that it can generate new ways of looking at existing problems,” said lead researcher Professor Lindell Bromham from the Australian National University.
“You might find that researchers in one field have developed a way of solving problems that might help in another field, or that a combination of perspectives brings a new way of looking at the problem.”
Bromham and her team applied techniques originally developed to measure biodiversity in living systems to an array of research proposals for the Australian Research Council Discovery Program. The Discovery Program is an annual competitive grants scheme that covers fundamental studies in all disciplines, including humanities, arts and sciences.
Bromham and colleagues used data from almost 19,000 proposals submitted to the Discovery Program over five consecutive years. They found that the greater the degree of inter-disciplinarity, the lower the probability of being funded.
“This study is one of the first to provide evidence that interdisciplinary research has lower funding success rates, and this pattern holds across different research fields and across institutions,” Bromham said.
“So now we have evidence there really is a problem, the next step would be to investigate why.”
The article can be found at: Bromham et al. (2016) Interdisciplinary Research has Consistently Lower Funding Success.
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Source: Australia National University; Photo: Pixabay.
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