Measuring Interdisciplinarity at the National Science Foundation

Fostering interdisciplinary research is a priority at the National Science Foundation (NSF). To this end, the NSF has undertaken several foundation-wide initiatives and encouraged the development of multi-directorate programs. As these new initiatives and programs grow, so does interest in assessing the success of such experiments in fostering interdisciplinary research (IDR). A primary challenge in measuring IDR is identifying and bounding the discrete disciplines that comprise interdisciplinary work (Wagner et al. 2011). A newly constructed topic model of the textual content of the NSF’s award proposals offers a new approach for quantifying IDR. This paper compares the use of institutional structure (via co-funding) and scientific content (via the topic model) for measuring IDR at the NSF.