Interdisciplinary research: putting the methods under the microscope

Many have analysed interdisciplinarity, especially in relation to the creation of new disciplines and institutions. These analyses are briefly outlined. Still, there currently persists a silence about the methods of interdisciplinary collaboration itself, and the core of this paper proposes a template for such methods.Breaking this silence – by making the methods of interdisciplinary projects transparent – could further invigorate interdisciplinary research."Herein lies one of the major crises of modern knowledge. It is what I have called the Humpty Dumpty problem. To understand the world it has seemed necessary to analyze it by breaking it into many pieces (i.e., the disciplines and their own divisions). But to act in the world, to try to address the issues for the understanding of which highly specialized knowledge was presumably sought, we need to somehow reassemble all the pieces. Here is the rub. Try as we may, we are no more able than all the king's horses and all the king's men to put our knowledge together again for coping with the whole real problems of the world."[1]Approaching research questions from the perspective of more than one discipline simultaneously, and thereby bridging disciplines, appears to be old hat. When, in the 1810s, Magendie brought together organic chemists and physiologists to investigate the importance of nitrogen in animal nutrition, he helped catalyse the birth of biochemistry [2]. Nernst similarly forged physical chemistry through his basic research in electrochemistry and thermodynamics during the early 20th century, and Delbrück's and Szilard's application of physics to cell reproduction proved instrumental in the eventual discovery of the DNA double helix. Moreover, many interdisciplinary institutions such as Rockefeller University, California Institute of Technology, Harvard's Bauer Center for Genomics Research have been established to foster interdisciplinary research.Nonetheless, while the desirability of interdisciplinary i