Archives des mots-clés : Interdisciplinarity

A l’épreuve de l’hétérogénéité : données de recherche et interdisciplinarité : L’exemple du projet européen IPERION-CH

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Auteur/Author : Marie Puren

Avec la mise en place de grandes infrastructures de recherche en sciences du patrimoine comme E-RIHS, on rassemble des acteurs divers, issus à la fois des sciences humaines et sociales et des sciences expérimentales. Le paléontologue croise l’historien de l’art, et le physicien collabore avec le restaurateur.

Dans ce cadre, la gestion des données de la recherche est un véritable défi, car elle doit rassembler, valoriser et rendre accessibles des données produites par des protagonistes très différents, utilisant des méthodes elles aussi très différentes. Comment en effet gérer et échanger à la fois des données d’expériences, des images numérisées et des rapports de restauration ?

Le cycle de vie des données de la recherche, de leur création à leur diffusion en passant par leur analyse, au sein de cette communauté interdisciplinaire interroge la définition même de ce type de données, et nous amène à questionner les pratiques autour de celles-ci.

URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01408951/

How Does National Scientific Funding Support Emerging Interdisciplinary Research: A Comparison Study of Big Data Research in the US and China

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Authors : Ying Huang, Yi Zhang, Jan Youtie, Alan L. Porter, Xuefeng Wang

How do funding agencies ramp-up their capabilities to support research in a rapidly emerging area?

This paper addresses this question through a comparison of research proposals awarded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in the field of Big Data.

Big data is characterized by its size and difficulties in capturing, curating, managing and processing it in reasonable periods of time. Although Big Data has its legacy in longstanding information technology research, the field grew very rapidly over a short period.

We find that the extent of interdisciplinarity is a key aspect in how these funding agencies address the rise of Big Data. Our results show that both agencies have been able to marshal funding to support Big Data research in multiple areas, but the NSF relies to a greater extent on multi-program funding from different fields.

We discuss how these interdisciplinary approaches reflect the research hot-spots and innovation pathways in these two countries.

URL : How Does National Scientific Funding Support Emerging Interdisciplinary Research: A Comparison Study of Big Data Research in the US and China

DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0154509

Prominent but Less Productive: The Impact of Interdisciplinarity on Scientists’ Research

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Inter-disciplinary research (IDR) is being promoted by federal agencies and universities nationwide because it presumably spurs transformative, innovative science. In this paper we bring empirical data to assess whether IDR is indeed beneficial, and whether costs accompany potential benefits. Existing research highlights this tension: whereas the innovation literature suggests that spanning disciplines is beneficial because it allows scientists to see connections across fields, the categories literature suggests that spanning disciplines is penalized, because the resulting research may be lower quality or confusing to place.

To investigate this, we empirically distinguish production and reception effects and we highlight a new production penalty: cognitive and collaborative challenges associated with IDR may result in slower progress, hurdles during peer review, and lower productivity (though not necessarily lower quality).

We compile and analyze data on almost 900 research center-based scientists and their 32,000 published articles. Using an innovative measure of IDR that considers the similarity of the disciplines spanned, we document both penalties (fewer papers published) and benefits (increased visibility) associated with IDR, and show that it is a high-risk, high-reward endeavor. These costs and benefits depend on characteristics of the field and a scientist’s place in it.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.06802

On the relationship between interdisciplinarity and impact: different modalities of interdisciplinarity lead to different types of impact

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“There is increasing interest among funding agencies to understand how they can best contribute to enhancing the socio-economic impact of research. Interdisciplinarity is often presented as a research mode that can facilitate impact but there exist a limited number of analytical studies that have attempted to examine whether or how interdisciplinarity can affect the societal relevance of research. We investigate fifteen Social Sciences research investments in the UK to examine how they have achieved impact. We analyse research drivers, cognitive distances, degree of integration, collaborative practices, stakeholder engagement and the type of impact generated. The analysis suggests that interdisciplinarity cannot be associated with a single type of impact mechanism. Also, interdisciplinarity is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for achieving societal relevance and impact. However, we identify a specific modality — “long-range” interdisciplinarity, which appears more likely to be associated with societal impact because of its focused problem-orientation and its strong interaction with stakeholders.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6684

Innovative information service development: meeting the information needs of an interdisciplinary, cross-sector research complex

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“Question: How can a team of health sciences librarians effectively meet the diverse needs of a new research complex?

Setting: A satellite location of an academic health sciences library that spearheads information services for an interdisciplinary, cross-sector research complex provides a case study.

Methods: The health sciences library established a library space at a new research complex that combines the services and expertise of a bioinformationist, translational research librarian, and public/private partnership librarian. The focus is on integrated information services, and the librarians serve as a boundary-spanning unit within the research complex.

Results: The colocation of the library with research cores and other units at the research complex has led to the creation of new partnerships and deepened existing ones.

Conclusion: Meeting the information needs of a diverse population requires a multifaceted approach to providing information services, and librarians must proactively seek out opportunities to establish meaningful collaborations.”

URL : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3878944/

Interdisciplinarity at the Journal and Specialty Level: The changing knowledge bases of the journal Cognitive Science

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Using the referencing patterns in articles in Cognitive Science over three decades, we analyze the knowledge base of this literature in terms of its changing disciplinary composition. Three periods are distinguished: (1) construction of the interdisciplinary space in the 1980s; (2) development of an interdisciplinary orientation in the 1990s; (3) reintegration into “cognitive psychology” in the 2000s. The fluidity and fuzziness of the interdisciplinary delineations in the different visualizations can be reduced and clarified using factor analysis. We also explore newly available routines (“CorText”) to analyze this development in terms of “tubes” using an alluvial map, and compare the results with an animation (using “visone”).

The historical specificity of this development can be compared with the development of “artificial intelligence” into an integrated specialty during this same period. “Interdisciplinarity” should be defined differently at the level of journals and of specialties.

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0823

Using bibliometrics to support the facilitation of cross-disciplinary communication

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Given the importance of cross-disciplinary research (CDR), facilitating CDR effectiveness is a priority for many institutions and funding agencies. There are a number of CDR types, however, and the effectiveness of facilitation efforts will require sensitivity to that diversity. This article presents a method characterizing a spectrum of CDR designed to inform facilitation efforts that relies on bibliometric techniques and citation data.

We illustrate its use by the Toolbox Project, an ongoing effort to enhance cross-disciplinary communication in CDR teams through structured, philosophical dialogue about research assumptions in a workshop setting. Toolbox Project workshops have been conducted with more than 85 research teams, but the project’s extensibility to an objectively characterized range of CDR collaborations has not been examined.

To guide wider application of the Toolbox Project, we have developed a method that uses multivariate statistical analyses of transformed citation proportions from published manuscripts to identify candidate areas of CDR, and then overlays information from previous Toolbox participant groups on these areas to determine candidate areas for future application.

The approach supplies 3 results of general interest:
1) A way to employ small data sets and familiar statistical techniques to characterize CDR spectra as a guide to scholarship on CDR patterns and trends.
2) A model for using bibliometric techniques to guide broadly applicable interventions similar to the Toolbox.
3) A method for identifying the location of collaborative CDR teams on a map of scientific activity, of use to research administrators, research teams, and other efforts to enhance CDR projects.

URL : http://www.cals.uidaho.edu/toolbox/pres/WilliamsEtAl-UsingBiblioToFacilitateCDC-JASIST-2013.pdf