So, tell us what is meant by interdisciplinary research?

Interdisciplinary research is an important feature of health research, and the Elizabeth Backwell Institute exists to nurture it in health research at the University of Bristol.

I find it interesting that people have different thoughts about what ‘interdisciplinary’ means, and sometimes we see other words used that look similar but that have slightly different meanings. Sometimes we hear people talk about research that is ‘multidisciplinary’ or ‘transdisciplinary’. I  think of multidisciplinary research as involving two or more disciplines bringing their viewpoints together to address a question. Transdisciplinary research achieves a higher level of integration, for instance by developing explanatory frameworks that exist outside or above and beyond disciplinary viewpoints.

Interdisciplinarity is probably best thought of as something of a middle ground between these two approaches, with disciplines working together to address a question or issue and then integrating their viewpoints, perhaps their findings, to produce answers or explanations. These are slightly rough and ready descriptions but these are the ones that I tend to use.

Here at the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute we are quite open minded about what we mean by interdisciplinarity; the key thing is that research advances our understanding or helps solve problems that can’t be easily addressed by a single discipline or area of research practice.

Why is it important?

When we think of research we sometimes think of individual ‘superstar’ scientists and some of our systems in research seem to reward those individuals. But these days much of our research is done in teams and real success happens when we collaborate. There are plenty of examples in which we need a variety of approaches working together to make breakthroughs. One example that we hear a lot about recently is research into Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR), which is fantastic example in which we need everyone from microbiologists to vets to engineers to anthropologists to behavioural scientists working on the same question from different angles.

I’ve thought for a long time that Bristol is uniquely skilled at interdisciplinarity, I think that it’s something that we do particularly well here and there’s a real openness to working together, learning from each other to address questions that have real social impact. It's important we create space and time to allow those interdisciplinary conversations to happen, and that’s something that we try to do in the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute through our research initiatives and thematic research strands.

What are some of the barriers and challenges?

Earlier I mentioned the expectation that science is done by superstars and that we have systems in place that reward this, and of course superstars might themselves be doing interdisciplinary research and be working across approaches. But we need to work out how to reward interdisciplinary research well and appropriately. Increasingly we’re seeing funding opportunities that ask for interdisciplinarity as part and parcel of the research, and I think this is a huge motivator for us as a research community. In health research there is a particularly strong tradition of interdisciplinary working, but often we still expect individuals to have a core discipline. Partly this is because we have to work in a highly skilled way and we all like to be experts in something, but I think there is probably still some work to be done to think about career pathways to enable and encourage people to develop expertise either in more than one area or to be able to have the space and time to work alongside others.

So, how can we do it better?

This is something we will look at an Elizabeth Blackwell Institute workshop on interdisciplinarity in health research on 24 February. This workshop brings together our collective experience, including the work of the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute’s research strand teams and colleagues across the University of Bristol. We will look at what interdisciplinarity in health research means and why it matters.

As well as thinking about how we can structure science to enable interdisciplinarity, there are also some key things that we can do as researchers to make it work better, often disciplines speak different ‘languages’ and have different priorities. Making these clear at the outset of any research project can be helpful but understanding one another is only part of the journey; we also must all agree on what the end points could or should be. This is all part of the interdisciplinary journey.

I will be interested to see if these questions come up at the workshop and what the best ways forward might be. At the workshop we will be focusing on the nature of interdisciplinarity and how we can do it better. It’s the first in a programme of activities led by the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute to explore the nature and type of our interdisciplinarity, to think about using interdisciplinarity as the springboard for successful funding bids, and to develop a set of recommendations about how to enable interdisciplinarity in health research to flourish.

Book your place

The workshop is open to all University of Bristol colleagues with an interest in interdisciplinary health research. We’ll share some reflections after the event, and we’ll plan a follow-up event later this year.

Register your workshop place for Interdisciplinarity in health research: how can we do it better?