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The purpose of this research was to understand the role of interdisciplinarity in research and how communication structures and processes at universities facilitates such work.

Twenty-one semi-structured interviews with administrators, faculty, and staff from US R-1 Carnegie-designated higher education institutions were conducted.

Institutional culture reportedly drives interdisciplinary research efforts and participants offered different values associated with pursuing interdisciplinary work. Participants also shared formal and informal incentives that motivate their pursuit of interdisciplinary collaborations. Participants seemed to prefer a blended centralized-decentralized approach for the communication function's support of interdisciplinary research efforts.

This research fills a gap in understanding of how organizational capacities, structures and processes support collaborative research work and public communication about such work.

The purpose of the article was to convey experiences with pioneering interdisciplinary sustainability research by involving undergraduate students. Experiences with initiating and conducting multiple research projects spanning engineering and sustainability are described, and recommendations for programs and faculty in other institutions of higher education that plan to implement or support similar endeavors are discussed.

The article and presented conclusions are based on three separate research projects, where specific examples as to how those projects were developed as well as challenges and rewards faced during the project are described.

It is concluded that faculty should not refrain from working with students from different backgrounds and disciplines. Bringing different backgrounds and perspectives to a project enables a big picture view of problems at hand and leads to better solutions that are more in line with the three pillars of sustainability, while at the same time providing valuable hands-on experience to undergraduate students.

By its very definition, sustainability is an interdisciplinary field and, thus, requires novel approaches for education and research compared to other settled fields of science. A viable way to increase the role of sustainability in higher education is to foster interdisciplinary research and teaching. The institutions role in promoting such efforts has been discussed together with example strategies that were found to be successful as well as those that were not. The article presents results of potential successes in projects where the traditional disciplinary bounds have been breached, and an interdisciplinary approach has been used to achieve project goals. The article also gives examples on what types of sustainability research can be conducted with undergraduate students.

This paper aims to investigate upper-undergraduate and graduate students’ perceptions of interdisciplinarity in relation to their information-seeking habits by analyzing their beliefs, rationalizations and preferences around the retrieval, evaluation and use of information sources for interdisciplinary research.

This study made use of focus group interviews with 18 student participants enrolled in different academic programs in the humanities and social sciences at a research university in Toronto. Transcript data were analyzed through use of the constant comparison method.

Students perceive the classification of library collections as both helpful and problematic in their pursuits of interdisciplinary work. Students believe that knowing how to identify appropriate terminology while navigating scholarly and non-scholarly environments is crucial to their success in interdisciplinary research. Librarians can adjust their service philosophies and research tools to better anticipate the needs of students engaged in interdisciplinary research.

This paper adds to the literature by providing library practitioners and other interested parties with a unique view of how undergraduate and graduate students contextualize their information needs when undertaking interdisciplinary research work.

The aim of this study is to profile interdisciplinary accounting research and the facilitating role played by researchers by probing the characteristics of published articles in three leading interdisciplinary accounting research journals, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ); Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS); and Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA).

Profiling analysis is undertaken with a broad scan of publication descriptors in AAAJ, AOS and CPA between 2005 and 2016. Profiling stems from identifying and quantifying the characteristics of interdisciplinary research, and with further analysis, infer generalisations about its content and the community of interdisciplinary researchers.

The published output of 1,462 articles is produced by 1,688 authors affiliated with 660 institutions in 52 countries. The two most high-ranking topics are social and environmental accounting and management accounting. The highest-ranked authors are Stephen Walker, Rob Bryer, Lee Parker and Yves Gendron. The most productive universities are the University of London, Cardiff University and the University of Manchester. The countries highly involved in interdisciplinary accounting research are the UK, USA, Australia and Canada.

The data is restricted by the sample of manuscripts based on three interdisciplinary accounting research journals for the period 2005–2016 and does not consider manuscripts published in other accounting and non-accounting journals. Additionally, the process of analysing publication descriptors to generate categorised lists was a complex process that may not be replicated precisely by other researchers.

The results reported in this study can assist researchers interested in interdisciplinary research on what they may expect to read and understand.

The present study profiles interdisciplinary research in accounting to gain a picture of the elements that comprise interdisciplinarity, which, at present, is without empirical investigation.

Based upon the argument that the primary characteristic of successful interdisciplinary research lies in human behavior and action (Brun et al., 2007 as cited in Buller, 2008), the purpose of this paper is to offer a view on human aspects of interdisciplinary research.

The paper presents interdisciplinary research as an overlapping process of collective human interactions, consisting of group composition, conceptualization, integration and contribution. Conceptualization and integration processes are particularly important for knowledge exchange and creation as individuals learn to translate, articulate, relate and relocate their original disciplinary positions (Buller, 2008). Further, the paper argues that interdisciplinarity can be enhanced through appropriate group mechanisms and practices; and successful interdisciplinary research also translates into individual (and group) learning and capability development, in addition to knowledge creation.

Interdisciplinary research is important for IB scholars to stay relevant in today's complex environment (Cheng et al., 2009). Since the South Asian region represents extreme contrast and paradoxes, interdisciplinary research could prove particularly valuable in exploring contradictions there (Khilji, 2012).

The value of this perspective is in describing interdisciplinary research as a boundary-spanning experience for researchers in that it facilitates creation of new insights and allows them to transcend their original discipline. However, interdisciplinarity itself is not automatic, but must be collectively managed through appropriate group mechanisms and practices (Buller, 2008; Haythornthwaite, 2006).

This study analyzed the interdisciplinary characteristics of Chinese research studies in library and information science (LIS) measured by knowledge elements extracted through the Lexicon-LSTM model.

Eight research themes were selected for experiment, with a large-scale (N = 11,625) dataset of research papers from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database constructed. And it is complemented with multiple corpora. Knowledge elements were extracted through a Lexicon-LSTM model. A subject knowledge graph is constructed to support the searching and classification of knowledge elements. An interdisciplinary-weighted average citation index space was constructed for measuring the interdisciplinary characteristics and contributions based on knowledge elements.

The empirical research shows that the Lexicon-LSTM model has superiority in the accuracy of extracting knowledge elements. In the field of LIS, the interdisciplinary diversity indicator showed an upward trend from 2011 to 2021, while the disciplinary balance and difference indicators showed a downward trend. The knowledge elements of theory and methodology could be used to detect and measure the interdisciplinary characteristics and contributions.

The extraction of knowledge elements facilitates the discovery of semantic information embedded in academic papers. The knowledge elements were proved feasible for measuring the interdisciplinary characteristics and exploring the changes in the time sequence, which helps for overview the state of the arts and future development trend of the interdisciplinary of research theme in LIS.

This paper aims to contribute to contemporary debates about interdisciplinarity and social marketing by presenting the critical reflections of a social marketer, a human geographer and an engineer on working across disciplines in an Australian community energy efficiency intervention – Energy + Illawarra. The paper also aims to identify challenges, practicalities and learning that emerge from collaborating on interdisciplinary projects. It also aims to provide some suggestions and guidelines for researchers in the interdisciplinary space.

The paper uses a case study approach and presents the critical reflections of a social marketer, a human geographer and an engineer on working together on the Energy + Illawarra project – a community energy efficiency social marketing intervention.

Challenges in interdisciplinary projects that are presented by differences in ontology, methodology, language and discourse are identified. The importance of being critically reflexive and openness to alternative perspectives are examined. Concerns over publishing interdisciplinary research are considered. The value of experimenting and developing partnerships through pilot projects is discussed. The potential of leveraging existing synergies and the opportunity to learn from clashes in ontology are also highlighted.

This paper contributes to the discussion about being interdisciplinary in social marketing by identifying subjectivities, practicalities and opportunities from collaborating on cross-disciplinary projects. Guidance for researchers on working on interdisciplinary projects offers value for social marketers working in this area.

Increased demand, limited resources, knowledge gaps, and seemingly less time to produce results are the challenges facing researchers and others in higher education today. Working together across disciplines is almost a requirement to stay afloat in the competitive arena most principal investigators are finding themselves in. This study sought to synthesize existing research on leadership behaviors of these investigators in the agricultural discipline. The sections specifically addressed include team science, discipline structure, boundary work, challenges of interdisciplinary research, the direction of research, and leadership in interdisciplinary teams. After analyzing 32 articles, researchers determined that research should continue to investigate the role of leadership behaviors in primary investigators to continue to improve effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the obstacles to interdisciplinary research and examine some ways that academic librarians can help to overcome them.

A broad review of the literature of the social sciences was reviewed for descriptions of difficulties that interdisciplinary researchers encounter. General developments in librarianship from library literature were then applied as a starting point for discussing ways that librarians can provide important services to interdisciplinary scholars.

Librarians, as “meta‐scholars”, can provide useful services to scholars engaging in interdisciplinary research.

Interdisciplinary research has shown great potential for problem‐solving, being focused more on a problem than with disciplinary distinctions. This is a worthy area for librarians to target with their skills and services.

This is a discussion of ways that librarians can break into new roles and responsibilities, and simultaneously strengthen their profile at a time when some expect librarianship to fade away.

Although interdisciplinary research is an increasing trend in scientific funding projects, they are suffering from a lower probability of being funded. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the current situation on successful case of funding application and provides suggestions on how libraries can expand services to help scientific funding application.

This paper utilizes the co-occurrences of disciplinary application codes to construct an interdisciplinary knowledge flow network. Based on 193517 sponsored projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the authors study the interdisciplinary flow of knowledge and investigate the evolution of network structure using social network analysis.

Results show that the interdisciplinary knowledge flow network is not only a small-world network but also a scale-free network. Two main knowledge flow paths across scientific departments exist, showing the heterogeneity of knowledge distributions across scientific disciplines. The authors also find that if two disciplines in the same scientific department both have a wide influence to other disciplines, they are more prone to link together and create a knowledge chain.

Funding consultation currently has not occupied an advisory role either in library services or in the research team. This paper conducts a co-occurrences network analysis of interdisciplinary knowledge flow in scientific funding projects. Considering the complexity of funding application and the advantage of traditional library services on information collection, integration, and utilization, the authors conclude the possibility and necessity of embedding funding consultation in traditional library services.