This paper presents two distance courses aimed at promoting interdisciplinarity. The first one was an internet-based distance undergraduate course in software engineering and management of software development projects for students of management and economy. The goal of the course was to bridge the gap between disciplines of economy (management) and software engineering, transfer knowledge and ...

Patterns of interdisciplinarity in science can be quantified through diverse complementary dimensions. This paper studies as a case study the scientific environment of a generalist journal in Geography, Cybergeo, in order to introduce a novel methodology combining citation network analysis and semantic analysis. We collect a large corpus of around 200,000 articles with their abstracts and the c...

Using Stokes’s (1997) “quadrant model of scientific research,” this paper deals with how the entrepreneurial orientation of scientists affects their scientific performance by considering its impact on scientific production (number of publications), scientific prestige (number of forward citations), and breadth of research activities (interdisciplinarity). The results of a quantitative analysis ...

The increasing use of mathematical techniques in scientific research leads to the interdisciplinarity of applied mathematics. This viewpoint is validated quantitatively here by statistical and network analysis on the corpus PNAS 1999-2013. A network describing the interdisciplinary relationships between disciplines in a panoramic view is built based on the corpus. Specific network indicators sh...

Nowadays, scientific challenges usually require approaches that cross traditional boundaries between academic disciplines, driving many researchers towards interdisciplinarity. Despite its obvious importance, there is a lack of studies on how to quantify the influence of interdisciplinarity on the research impact, posing uncertainty in a proper evaluation for hiring and funding purposes. Here w...

Interaction among the scientific disciplines is of vital importance in modern science. Focusing on the case of Slovenia, we study the dynamics of interdisciplinary sciences from 1960 to 2010. Our approach relies on quantifying the interdisciplinarity of research communities detected in the coauthorship network of Slovenian scientists over time. Examining the evolution of the community structure...

Within this short communication article, we consider the value that closer and earlier collaboration between engineers and social scientists could offer the research, development, demonstration and deployment (RDD & D) of industrial technologies. We consider perspectives taken from both the social sciences and engineering in order to highlight the prejudices and misunderstandings that currently...

It is no surprise that in a world dominated by business models and bottom lines that talk of interdisciplinarity is on the rise in science, as we are increasingly encouraged to be innovative through collaboration that ‘leverages’, ‘exploits’, and ‘optimizes’ resources. If you have not already heard these words around your workplace, you probably soon will. In fact, interdisciplinarity is now be...

Interdisciplinarity has become one of the catchwords in current higher education and science policies, with underlying rationale being that scientific breakthroughs solutions to today’s global challenges require collaboration across fields. However, several empirical studies have shown interdisciplinary promises are not necessarily realised research practices, due manifold cognitive, epistemic,...