Von Schomberg, L. & Godin, B. (2021). Scientific report prepared for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Accepted for publication in SSHRC's upcoming strategic plan.
“We are not students of some subject matter, but students of problems. And problems may cut right across the boundaries of any subject matter or discipline” - Karl Popper (1963, p. 88)
In 2016, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) launched its strategic plan with the objective of supporting and promoting Canada’s position as a leader in research and training for research in the humanities and social sciences. That plan ends in March 2021, and initiatives are underway to develop a new strategy for the spring of 2021. In this context, SSHRC has to identify the principal trends in the research environment and must understand how the research sector has evolved in Canada.
One subject to be considered concerns the trends regarding interdisciplinary collaborations. All across the globe, universities and research funding agencies increasingly call for interdisciplinarity, presuming that this will result in significant societal impact with regard to today’s global challenges. Although approaches may differ from one another in terms of origins and purpose, the general belief holds that the complex nature of current social, economic, and environmental problems requires the integration of disciplines from fields as far apart as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and social sciences and humanities (SSH). SSHRC shares this belief, as reflected in several of its initiatives to mobilize research across all sectors.
Conceptually and historically the presumed strength of interdisciplinarity is widely considered to be well-founded, although contested by some. For several decades, historians have documented numerous cases of new scientific fields emerging from interdisciplinarity. More recent scholarly works on the subject matter, such as Julie Klein’s Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (1990) and Robert Frodeman’s Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (2017), have managed to thoroughly display the benefits and challenges of interdisciplinarity. On the one hand, a vast number of documented cases demonstrate that the integration of knowledge from different disciplines can generate groundbreaking results. On the other hand, the current institutional landscape along with many practical difficulties bring the possibility of interdisciplinarity into question. In this respect, studies show that the domain specificity of scientific practices is in fact essential for solving complex problems in a cognitively manageable way.
Beyond philosophical intuition and apologetic justification, the question is whether interdisciplinarity in effect leads to its presumed impact. While investigations on the scientific impact of interdisciplinarity are numerous, investigations on the societal impact of interdisciplinarity are scarce. Upon examination, this gap in the literature can be explained firstly because interdisciplinary research does not take place as often as is proclaimed, and secondly because there are few tools available to measure the degree in which research is interdisciplinary.
This is reflected in the analysis of the specific distribution of Insight Grants, as well as in the analysis of the general distribution of SSHRC grants. Both point to the data restrictions and the issue of classifying research as interdisciplinary. In striking contrast with the call for interdisciplinarity, the findings demonstrate that research priorities are often tackled either by a single discipline or by a collaboration of disciplines that stand relatively close to each other, such as economy and management.
Writing and reviewing interdisciplinary grants implies a structural and cultural change in the research landscape and thus requires time, but if agencies and institutions are committed this change is likely to take place. In this respect, similar to other initiatives such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) serves as a good example of an attempt to overcome disciplinary barriers toward achieving societal impact.
Finally, we believe that even the highest degree of interdisciplinarity is built on disciplinary grounds. Without such grounds, interdisciplinarity would be intangible; and without clear policy demands on societal problems to be addressed, its impact remains strictly scientific.
Full report available in SSHRC's upcoming strategic plan (2021)
