Abstract
Interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly between natural and social sciences, is perceived as crucial to solving the significant challenges facing humanity. However, despite the need for such collaboration being expressed more frequently and intensely, it remains unclear to what degree such collaboration actually takes place, what trends and developments there are and which actors are involved. Previous studies, often based on bibliometric analysis of large bodies of literature, partly observed an increase in interdisciplinary collaboration in general, but in particular, the collaboration among distant fields was less explored. Other more qualitative studies found that interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly between natural and social scientists was not well developed, and obstacles abounded. To shed some light on the actual status and developments of this collaboration, we performed an analysis based on a sample of articles on groundwater research. We first identified journals and articles therein that potentially combined natural and social science aspects of groundwater research. Next, we analysed the disciplinary composition of their authors’ teams, cited references, titles and keywords, making use of our detailed personal expertise in groundwater research and its interdisciplinary aspects. We combined several indicators developed from this analysis into a final classification of the degree of multidisciplinarity of each article. Covering the period between 1990 and 2014, we found that the overall percentage of multidisciplinary articles was in the low single-digit range, with only slight increases over the past decades. The interdisciplinarity of individuals plays a major role compared to interdisciplinarity involving two or more researchers. If collaboration with natural sciences takes place, social science is represented most often by economists. As a side result, we found that journals publishing multidisciplinary research had lower impact factors on average, and multidisciplinary papers were cited much less than mono-disciplinary ones.
Highlights
1.1 Background and motivation “To solve the grand challenges facing society—energy, water, climate, food, health scientists and social scientists must work together”
The main conclusions drawn from this study are as follows: Share of journal articles based on multidisciplinary collaboration between natural and social sciences:
Groundwater-related articles showing a high likelihood of resulting from collaborations between natural and social sciences occur in the 1% range, with a slightly increasing tendency
Summary
1.1 Background and motivation “To solve the grand challenges facing society—energy, water, climate, food, health scientists and social scientists must work together”. This statement begins the editorial in the recently published special issue on interdisciplinarity in Nature [1] (p.305). In the above-mentioned issue of Nature, Ana Viseu reports her experiences as a social scientist working for a natural science research organisation [3]. She concludes that social scientists in collaboration with natural scientists often only play a “service role”, for example, to satisfy the requirements of research funders. Social scientists tell us about last-minute invitations to help fulfil funding agencies’ requirement of including societal components in proposals (anecdotal evidence)
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