Multidisciplinary research or covering an area of research from different disciplinary perspective
Thankyou all for your valueable comments, n Kate thanks for sharing information. Infact cross desciplinary research is a future as Anum, Peter and Amir said. It will indeed open several dimensions further to search on.
Yes! because from the different disciplines people gathered and work to solve one research problem. It obviously helps for the clarity.
Yes absolutely, if focused on a common problem cross-disciplinary teams could cure cancer with new and innovative ways to solve a biological problems from an engineering standpoint etc. There was a great documentary recently on SBS that talked about this very thing just the other day. One guy being fluent in many sub disciplines of science conducting a symphony of scientists to solve different problems in a focused manner. The human brain is still limited in its capacity to store certain different types of knowledge. So when teams come together, it's very powerful. I'm sorry I've forgotten the name of the documentary but it was about the recent trajectory of inventions and how science teams are coming together to solve problems etc. Can anyone remember the name of it?
ooohh I found it... http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/85668419513/Tomorrows-World
Multidisciplinary research, when done by a team of researchers, requires highly specialized profiles. As well, multidisciplinary research by individual scientists does also require previous specialization in the various disciplines.
Therefore, in my opinion multidisciplinarity and specialization in research can not be easily differenciated. Multidisciplinarity does not guarantee the quality of research, and specialization, also does not increase by itself the quality of the research.
I agree with Kate when she says that a skilled (in various fields) coordinator working with a symphony of scientists (in an orchestra each one is specialized in one instrument) might obtain better results than a highly specialized researcher or highly specialized team, but it might well be the opposite in some cases.
I think the hypothesis in the question is highly interesting since me and other colleages developed a measure for the multidisciplinarity/specialization of reseach outputs (taking into account from how many different fields do citations and references come: it is freely available in arXiv): it might be interesting to test if multidisciplinary works show better quality indexes or not.
fantastic Jorge! Sounds like a very worthwhile measure indeed. I guess whatever your level you can also still learn from those who are more experienced by working like this as well if the areas are closely aligned.
Especially in applied R&D projects (like, for instance, in the field of digital archives and libraries), cross-disciplinary research is more or less becoming the standard approach.
Nevertheless, it is a rather complicate "thing" to bring together specialists from different disciplines (such as for instance, library sciences, linguistics and semiotics, sociology and psychology, computer sciences, etc.). It's not only the fact that such projects involve a lot of work in project management. It is, more basically and first of all, very difficult to establish a kinf of common language between people working in different disciplines, common theoretical and methodological references and - last but not least - a kind of common vision shared by every actor engaged in a cross-disciplinary projet.
Personnally, I think that cross-disciplinary (hence problem-oriented) research is a real desideratum in social and human sciences but it is really not obvious to install it in our concrete research agendas.
Thankyou all for your valueable comments, n Kate thanks for sharing information. Infact cross desciplinary research is a future as Anum, Peter and Amir said. It will indeed open several dimensions further to search on.
interdisciplinary research is a safeguard against myopic inefficient investigations inappropriately and inadequately concentrating on certain areas giving a blind eye to relevant inspirational areas.
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