Mariya Shumska was excited to present her work to a new audience. As she got through the slides, she felt she had a great rhythm and everything was going smoothly. But then she noticed her audience staring blankly at her.

Shumska, a computer scientist, builds algorithms which help doctors interpret neuroimaging data from patients with hyperkinetic movement disorders. And here she was at a medical symposium, presenting her work, but her audience of medical researchers had no idea what she was talking about. 

Her work could help arrive at better and more personalised analyses and diagnoses faster. ‘But many medical journals haven’t kept up with modern machine learning techniques.’ And so Shumska encountered a problem that many interdisciplinary researchers face.

Shift

After many decades of scientific specialisation, of different scientific areas of expertise fragmenting into yet more specific disciplines, these last few years have seen a shift. Interdisciplinary research is gaining momentum. And with good reason. 

After all, when you research a medical problem, there’s more to it than just studying viruses or cell division. There’s psychological sides to the problem, communicational aspects, or even economic ones. And when you try to build an AI, you’re not just computing, you need to know how the human mind functions. 

Hearing new ideas and perspectives changes the way you view your field

Interdisciplinary work can radically reshape the very questions a field asks. ‘Not being stuck in an echo chamber, but hearing new ideas and perspectives, changes the way you view your field’, says Alex Smit, a researcher at the Digital Inclusion Lab focusing on social-digital inequality. ‘That term was popularised by Ellen Helsper, an interdisciplinary researcher influenced by sociological debates. Media studies focused on digital inequality, but we realised you cannot separate the social from the digital.’ 

The University of Groningen, too, values the importance of interdisciplinary work. It founded four ‘schools’ in the last five years. The Jantina Tammes School brings expertise on the digital society, the Aletta Jacobs School of Public Health focuses on medical topics, and the Wubbo Ockels School is working on energy and climate-related problems. Finally, there’s the Rudolf Agricola School, centring on sustainability. 

Language

But setting up schools or funding and facilitating interdisciplinary research projects doesn’t cross the divide that has been created by all these years of specialisation. There are many hurdles that have to be addressed. One of them, as PhD student Thereza Langeler found, is the language researchers use to describe their work. 

Her research focuses on the anti-urban resentment in the Netherlands and its intersection with populism, and spans political science, sociology, and geography. ‘In geographical research, they will use the term “place” for a particular meaningful place and “space” for a physical location. Sociologists will use the same words with reversed meanings’, explains Langeler. 

And that’s not the only difference she encountered. ‘The authors to cite for a common method such as discourse analysis – common to geographers and sociologists – are different. So I will mention an author to my geographer supervisors and they won’t even know who that is’, says Langeler. 

Knowledge gaps

With two different languages and two bodies of supporting research even in related fields, it is a challenge to combine disciplines. ‘In the beginning I had no idea what I was doing’, Langeler confesses. ‘I always have this voice in the back of my head saying: what would my other discipline have to say about this?’ 

Geographers and social scientists use the same words with reversed meanings 

And what also proved difficult: determining what is not yet known within a field. ‘If I thought of something that was interesting to research, I wasn’t sure if I had found a knowledge gap or if it was something every average bachelor student in the field already knew.’ 

She tries not to think of her work in interdisciplinary terms, but rather like that of a social scientist who happens to do work in politics and place, she says. ‘But this becomes slightly more of a source of insecurity when presenting work to an audience exclusively of geographers or political scientists.’

In research group presentations, Langeler has had experiences presenting to niche audiences who bring up vocabulary foreign to her. ‘Why has nobody ever told me the word “communitarianism” before?’ she thought.

Depth

Beer Prakken, who studies humour and play in political discourse, recognises this insecurity. ‘I’m still not sure what kind of researcher I am. I’m dealing with finding my own discipline.’

His research cuts across political science, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. ‘People advise me to find a lane. Be a political scientist, be a sociologist’, he says. ‘Those who focus more on humour studies want me to be more critical of humour and bring in politics, whereas political scientists want me to bring in humour as an important factor.’  

It can also be difficult to get the right depth to your work, Ishitro Bhaduri has noticed. He’s a PhD at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials who works under CogniGron, an interdisciplinary group focused on energy efficient computing. ‘It’s easy to get the deeper component since you’re surrounded by people who know your topic quite well’, he says. ‘But this doesn’t give you the broadening component for your work. And you can only read so much.’ 

Still, they all agree that they need the different disciplines to really get to the heart of the problem they are researching. ‘If I were just to focus on one discipline, I would not be able to go as deep on my topic’, Prakken says. 

Audience

However, that does present another problem. Because when you don’t fit neatly into one of the traditional disciplinary boxes, it can be hard to find the right publication audience for your work as well.

‘Even if we have nice results, some medical journals don’t have enough expertise to understand what you’re doing, so they will reject your paper anyway’, Shumska says.

I would not be able to go as deep on my topic within one discipline

Another issue, she found, is that the different disciplines will not appreciate what you are doing. ‘Hyperkinetic movement disorders are quite a niche’, she says. ‘A technical, computer science-oriented audience may not find your methodology new enough. They’ll say you just applied existing methods to a new dataset. But if your methodology is standard for machine learning, but complicated for the medical community, it also may not be accepted.’

Prakken has had to deal with this as well. If he wants to publish on humour in political science journals, he faces an uphill battle because those audiences aren’t usually interested in the topic. He thinks it’s wise to focus on finding your audience rather than publishing for a paper specifically. ‘There is an inherent pressure to be strategic in publishing and find a lane, but I think this is bad for your research’, he says. 

Funding

And then there is, as always, the problem of funding. Prakken’s work on humour doesn’t fit into any single discipline and neither does it fit particularly nicely with his Rudolf Agricola umbrella school, which is all about sustainability. ‘I got the chance to go to Yale University for a semester’, he says. ‘But I really struggled to get the funding for that from the Agricola school because of this.’

It’s extra problematic, he says, because interdisciplinary researchers need to go to more conferences than regular researchers to reach their audiences. And they have far more trouble getting those funded. 

Problems aplenty, then. So how to solve them? 

‘Maybe there can be a separate fund for interdisciplinary research which doesn’t make normative assessments beforehand’, suggests Prakken.

That approach worked quite well for Langeler. Her PhD position falls under the Young Academy Groningen (YAG), which aims to promote interdisciplinary research and provides funding for projects chosen by YAG supervisors.

Network

What also helps is creating a strong network around you, the researchers say. Bhaduri was already able to build a network when he did his nanoscience master at the UG. ‘I did my bachelor and master here and got to know many professors, researchers, and principal investigators’, he says. ‘ That helped me understand which group is doing what.’

Maybe there can be a separate fund for interdisciplinary research

But Smit doesn’t have that interdisciplinary network directly around him. His solution? ‘I rely on LinkedIn to share my work and forge connections.’

For others, their supervisor is key. Both Langeler and Shumska have multiple supervisors. ‘They provide different perspectives. One supervisor is a strictly medical professional, one is from machine learning, and two are much more interdisciplinary’, Shumska says. 

‘Getting the lay of the land of two disciplines was challenging at first’, says Langeler. ‘I mostly navigated it by asking my two supervisors every time I had an idea if it was new or something I should read about. And they would help me find researchers.’

Colleagues

Smit also finds unstructured conversations with different lab members highly helpful. ‘I often do presentations online to other researchers across the Netherlands and Europe. It’s ad hoc.’

Bhaduri praises the ‘research away day’ organised by CogniGron, where people spend a day doing group activities. ‘These days work really well, because they allow you to talk about your research and get to know your colleagues in a relaxed setting.’

The most important, though, is personal initiative. ‘As an interdisciplinary researcher, you need to be more assertive than those stuck in a discipline’, Prakken says. Bhaduri agrees. ‘If you put the effort in and the circumstances are more or less aligned, it will work in your favour. But a little bit of planning and effort is always needed.’

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