MCubed: The Formation and Output of Incentivized Interdisciplinary Collaborations.

[摘要] Interdisciplinary collaboration involves many challenges. Simply finding researchers with the complementary expertise necessary to answer certain research questions can be a challenge. Once researchers find collaborators, differences in tacit disciplinary knowledge can make communication and agreement on research approaches difficult. Adding to these difficulties are the accepted norms regarding the theoretical and methodological approaches to research of the institutions surrounding various disciplines, such as university departments and publication venues. It should come as no surprise that conflicting evidence exists regarding the effect of interdisciplinary collaboration, with some studies showing benefits and others suggesting that the costs outweigh the benefits. This study uses a mixed methods approach to understand how these challenges affected the interdisciplinary projects funded by the MCubed initiative at the University of Michigan.Many researchers who participated in MCubed found their collaborators through existing professional networks, rather than the MCubed website. While prior interactions appeared to strongly influence the researchers chosen for collaboration on MCubed projects, those prior interactions did not appear to influence output from those projects. The use of certain technical tools—specifically, shared file repositories—was positively correlated to certain types of project output. The degree of institutional financial support—both within a department and the funding available to various disciplines—played a large part in both the decision to collaborate on a project and the output from a project. Each research project can produce a wide range of outputs. The perceived value of that output is greatly influenced by the norms of each discipline, as evidenced by individual departments and larger disciplinary institutions, such as funding agencies and publication venues. Moreover, disciplinary similarity was positively correlated to peer-reviewed project output. These findings suggest that the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration are a matter of perception and degree.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Research Networking Systems

[关键词] Interdisciplinary collaboration;Research Networking Systems;Communications;Information and Library Science;Social Sciences;Information