Extending the Application of an Instrument to Facilitate Interdisciplinary Research

• Activity Number: 507
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: WNAR
• Author(s): Christopher Williams*+
• Companies: University of Idaho
• Keywords: compositional data ; sensitivity analysis ; interdisciplinary research

Abstract

Facilitating the development of effective interdisciplinary research (IDR) teams is an important goal. The Toolbox project, developed by University of Idaho researchers, aims to enhance cross-disciplinary communication among scientific collaborators through philosophical dialogue about research assumptions. The project has been implemented with more than 30 research teams, and we wish to identify active areas of IDR for extension of the Toolbox approach. We address this objective using two sources of data: i) citation information from a random sample of 1000 publications, and ii) disciplinary affiliation information on 28 research teams that have participated in the Toolbox project. The analyses involve compositional data, which lead to the use of log-ratio transformed proportions. Multivariate methods are then used to illustrate active research areas, which are compared with the affiliation of teams that have participated in the Toolbox project, to suggest candidate research areas for extension of the project. Several types of sensitivity analyses are used to assess the robustness of the conclusions.