Perils and Pleasures of Multidisciplinary Research
To deal adequately with the complexities of the real world, engaged research must often be strongly multidisciplinary. Although multidisciplinary research can be important, productive, and fun, it is not without its potential pitfalls. Lawrence Baker, Senior Fellow in the Water Resources Center at the University of Minnesota, has written a witty and insightful essay on the topic: "Perils and Pleasures of Multidisciplinary Research", in Urban Ecosyst. (2006) 9: 45-47. The full article is well worth reading, but here I'll just summarize some of the "perils" that Baker identifies.
"The Escher Staircase": The tendency for the practitioners of each discipline in a collaboration to view their own specialty as superior, while looking down on the others.
"The Emperor Has No Clothes": The weakness of established paradigms in one field when exposed to the questioning from another.
"The Tower of Babel": The difficulty of translating jargon from one field to another, when even the same word may have different meanings.
"Trusting strangers": The need to take the time -- often quite a long time -- "to fully appreciate the key paradigms and methods of the assembled disciplines."
"Dividing the loaf": The misunderstandings that may arise from different funding standards in different fields, e.g., in the support of graduate students.
"Playing with others": The need to relax expectations of small-group hierarchies in a single discipline, in favor of the often chaotic structure of a large, multidisciplinary group.
"Publish or perish": The different expectations regarding publication in different fields -- books vs. articles -- and the difficulty in doing the cross-disciplinary synthetic thinking from the very beginning that will lead to an integrated, cohesive product at the end.
Despite noting these very real obstacles to successful multidisciplinary research, Baker ends on a more positive note:
"Finding Nirvana. Over the long run, I think most of my colleagues who have engaged in multidisciplinary efforts and stuck with it for a few years have no regrets. This is particularly true when the research “takes it up a notch” to the level of transdisciplinary understanding— understanding that requires disciplinary insights but transcends knowledge that could be gained within any single discipline. In fact, most new knowledge is achieved in this way. It is also rewarding in more tangible ways. The sustained hard work and congeniality can result in considerable synergy, resulting in enhanced productivity for all participants over the long run. More importantly, it is simply fun, learning for the sake of learning, presumably the reason most of us went into academia. And it sure beats getting old."