Barriers to IDR

[Tim Dean]

This thread will be for a catalogue and discussion of barriers to conducting successful interdisciplinary research (IDR). Please contribute and critique.

I'll kick off with a few:

Structural

• Individual academic disciplines are typically very narrow and deep and often focus primarily on problems manifest within that field, so are likely to miss questions outside their speciality or real-world problems that require input from multiple disciplines
• University departments are typically highly siloed with little communication encouraged or facilitated between disciplines
• Universities often encourage IDR but do little to facilitate it or reduce the opportunity costs of engaging in IDR
• Managing the leadership of an IDR project is often left as a multi-lateral affair, with researchers from multiple disciplines forced to negotiate amongst themselves to organise the structure of the project
  
• Students are encouraged to specialise relatively early and thus tend to become channelled into one field. As a result, individuals who are interested in specialising tend to receive higher academic accolades than generalists
  
• There are few interdisciplinary courses available above the undergraduate level and no courses (that I know of) explicitly for cross-disciplinary generalists at the graduate level and above
  

Journals

• The academic system and job market reward specialist research over interdisciplinary research by rating research published in high impact specialist journals over that published in IDR journals
• There are few (if any) high impact journals that cross disciplines or are question-led instead of discipline-led that will publish IDR

Funding

• Funding bodies tend to have review boards that are relatively narrow in their specialisation thus disadvantaging an application that requires review from more than one board
• Funding tends to be given to one researcher or group for a project which then needs to be divvied up between research groups for IDR

Cultural

• Many academics have a negative attitude towards IDR in practice because of past hopes and let-downs despite agreeing that IDR is good in principle
• Many disciplines have a 'disciplinary cringe' and diminish the importance of other disciplines and are less likely to engage in IDR with them
• Many academics don't like being perceived as being non-experts and are thus less likely to engage in IDR where they have a lot to learn or feel they won't be respected as being an expert
• The bi-lateral nature of much IDR means dominant personalities can be disruptive to egalitarian leadership arrangements

Theoretical

• Each specialist discipline will employ its own jargon and methodologies which makes communication between disciplines difficult
• Each specialist discipline has its own ontology that is often not easily reconcilable with other disciplines' ontologies
• The interrelation of disciplines and theories is poorly understood on the philosophical level