Factors that Impact Interdisciplinary Natural Science Research Collaboration in Academia 1

Abstract

Interdisciplinary collaboration occurs when people with different educational and research backgrounds bring complementary skills to bear on a problem or task. The strength of interdisciplinary scientific research collaboration is its capacity to bring together diverse scientific knowledge to address complex problems and questions. However, interdisciplinary scientific research can be difficult to initiate and sustain. We do not yet fully understand factors that impact interdisciplinary scientific research collaboration. This study synthesizes empirical data from two empirical studies to provide a more comprehensive understanding of interdisciplinary scientific research collaboration within the natural sciences in academia. Data analysis confirmed factors previously identified in various literatures and yielded new factors. A total of twenty factors were identified, and classified into four categories: personal, resources, motivation and common ground. These categories and their factors are described, and implications for academic policies and practices to facilitate and sustain interdisciplinary collaboration are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 51 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.