Market research published report:
Interdisciplinarity: survey report for the Global Research Council

The Global Research Council recognises the need to better understand the levels of interdisciplinarity in the existing research base, and also to ensure that interdisciplinary research projects are treated fairly and consistently. Indeed, the Global Research Council provides a unique forum for funders across the world to discuss how best to support and facilitate interdisciplinary research.

This report, published by DJS Research and commissioned by Research Councils UK and the Indian Science and Engineering Research Board, co-hosts of the Global Research Council 2016 annual meeting in Delhi, seeks to provide the basis for further discussion on the topic of interdisciplinarity.

The key objective of this report is to establish policies and good working practices employed by funding agencies across all five Global Research Council regions: Africa, Americas, Asia-Pacific, Middle East/North Africa (MENA) and Europe – that ensure interdisciplinary research is supported, facilitated and treated fairly and consistently.

In particular, viewpoints were sought from participating agencies in the following three sections:

• Establishing the right conditions for interdisciplinary working.
• Assessment, evaluation and measurement of interdisciplinary research (proposal and publication).
• Careers, training & recognition.

Furthermore, the functions of this report are:

• To serve as a discussion paper for the Global Research Council annual meeting.
• To create a useful baseline of policies and practices of GRC participants in the topic area.
• To be published with the proposed ‘Interdisciplinarity’ position statement following the 2016 Global Research Council annual meeting.

DJS Research used desk research and qualitative research methodologies in a two-pronged approach to assess policies and good working practices employed by funding agencies in facilitating interdisciplinary research.

DJS Research conducted an extensive piece of desk research to assess the plethora of literature available on interdisciplinary research. Specifically, the desk research seeks to summarise the findings of diverse pieces of research, case studies, whitepapers and government policies that address funding agencies’ roles, responsibilities and limitations in the promotion of interdisciplinary research. The analysis of published data on the subject of interdisciplinarity sets the background to the findings ascertained in the second methodology employed by DJS Research.