Interdisciplinarity: looking towards new research horizons

ellyviti
May 9, 2019
3 min read

Updated: Jun 12, 2019

According to definition, Interdisciplinarity is a combination of two or more academic domains joining efforts in solving particular issues, as it is often the case in a research project. Interdisciplinary collaborations can bridge disciplines relatively close in terms of field of interest -such as politics and law focused on voting or electing laws, and finance campaign laws. Besides, the interaction between divergent branches of knowledge creates exciting new fields as social anthropology, studying how cultures and societies evolve in parallel, or philosophy of medicine, exploring the ethics of health sciences.

As Richard Van Noorden commented in “Interdisciplinary research by the numbers” (Nature, 2015), interdisciplinary papers escalated from mid-80s onwards. Alongside, the word “Interdisciplinarity” itself brings to mind very recent memories of progresses in the fields of engineering and artificial intelligence aimed to support medical treatment and procedures. Yet, what it might appear a twentieth century term, it is instead far more ancient that what we imagine. Precisely, it goes back all the way to Ancient Greece (6th century BC), at the times when “philosophy” researchers investigated medicine, physics, chemistry or astronomy in a non-religious way. Their discoveries were free from the boundaries of nowadays disciplines, because they stemmed from simple observations coming from any daily life element (stars, animals, humans…). It is only with the accumulation of knowledge through the centuries that researchers started defining major domains and fields of studies.

Although in theory any interaction between branches of knowledge is possible, not all the disciplines are susceptible to interdisciplinary collaborations the same way. Richard Van Noorden takes citations and references from other fields as a parameter of Interdisciplinarity (Interdisciplinary research by the numbers”, Nature, 2015) to compare how interdisciplinary a discipline is. According to the data presented, arts, biology, engineering and technology are some of the domains more prone to trespass their own boundaries. On the contrary, mathematics, clinical medicine and economics are some of the fields with apparent less frequent contact with other disciplines.

Alongside the nature of the domain, the country of investigations seem also playing a role in the opening towards interdisciplinary approaches. Up to 2015, India resulted the state publishing most of the “interdisciplinary papers” (13% of over 30000 published in 2013), followed by China, Taiwan and South Korea (above 10%). In a second group with a little less than 10% each, USA, UK and Germany, despite of being themselves massive producers of innovation.

As the interdisciplinary trend grows, these numbers are bound to increase. Similarly, moving towards the future, education will become more and more interdisciplinary, challenging the limits of disciplines the way we know (GOOD reading: “The university of the future will be interdisciplinary” in The Guardian, 24th Jan2018). I personally observed this change when discussing with students of biotechnology and biology graduated only 5 years later than myself: in their academic path notions of programming, material science, and physics became more discussed, and often they occupied and entire class subject or course within the university degree program.

The realised lack in concepts from biophysics, now taught in universities to younger students, represented a personal urge to move my scientific career towards interdisciplinary studies, merging biophysics with a previous molecular and cellular biology background. Today, with the completion of my interdisciplinary postdoc, I can sincerely affirm that Interdisciplinarity broadens the possible points of views of a research problem, ignites technological improvements and reshape methods tackling precise scientific questions.

As well presented by the educational psychologist and Interdisciplinarity expert, Sharon Derry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) in an interview with Heidi Ledford (“How to solve the world's biggest problems”, Nature, 16 September 2015) “We have to bring people with different kinds of skills and expertise together. No one has everything that's needed to deal with the issues that we're facing.”