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Teamwork is not essential to interdisciplinarity. The interdisciplinary research process as outlined in Repko (2011) can be performed by individuals or teams. But the individual researcher must gain adequacy in each discipline that they draw upon. Team research allows collaboration among researchers with different areas of expertise. But team research has its own challenges: miscommunication, different perspectives, different expectations, personality conflicts, managerial challenges, and so on. A whole literature has emerged to address the challenges of team research.
There is a host of research here which can be captured under several headings:
Beneficial Personality Factors of Team Members
Encouraging Positive Team Dynamics
Importance of Early Interactions
Evidence of the Benefits of Team Research
We might draw special attention to the role of The 'Specialized Interdisciplinarian'.
Teamwork is emphasized by all authors in the Handbook of Transdisciplinary Research. Successful teamwork processes “require carefully structured, sequenced, and selected negotiations and interactions” (Wiesmann et al. 2008, 437). This takes time, requires mutual acceptance of team goals, and depends on encouraging mutual respect. Teamwork implies additional steps at the start of the research process. Chapters 3 and 4 in Lyall, Catherine; Bruce, Ann; Tait, Joyce, Meagher. Laura Interdisciplinary Research Journeys.Huntingdon, GBR: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2011 also address these issues. Various publications associated with Science of Team Science are crucial here, and are cited on subsidiary pages. Daniel Stokols, Kara L. Hall, Richard P. Moser, Annie Feng, Shalini Misra, and Brandie K. Taylor, "Cross-disciplinary team science initiatives: research, training, and translation," Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity" (2010), 471-93, summarizes much of this literature. See also Bennett, L., Gadlin, H. & Levine-Finley, S. (2010). Collaboration and Team Science: A Field Guide. Bethesda: National Institutes of Health, for an overview.
http://www.teamsciencetoolkit.cancer.gov/ has some interesting links. The Toolkit is an online knowledge management system that collects and integrates TS knowledge and resources and makes them readily accessible to the public. It contains hundreds of resources; it should be noted that there is no vetting process for inclusion. An overview of the Toolkit is provided in The Team Science Toolkit: Enhancing Research Collaboration Through Online Knowledge Sharing; Vogel A L, Hall K L, Fiore S M, Klein J T, Michelle Bennett L, Gadlin H, Stokols D, Nebeling L C, Wuchty S, Patrick K, Spotts E L, Pohl C, Riley W T, Falk-Krzesinski H J 2013. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, V45, N6, pp 787-789. See http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2013.09.001
A set of ten "short guides" to various research tasks, including building and managing interdisciplinary research teams, troubleshooting common interdisciplinary research management problems, developing interdisciplinary strategies for research groups, and leading interdisciplinary initiatives, authored by Catherine Lyall and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh can be found at: https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/ISSTIInterdisciplinary/ID+Short+Notes
Julie Thompson Klein provides both an annotated bibliography and a coaching and training guide for team science here.
S. Derry, C. D. Schunn, & M. A. Gernsbacher (Eds.). (2005). Interdisciplinary Collaboration: An Emerging Cognitive Science Mahwah, NJ: Psychology Press. 51-82, discusses the cognitive aspects of interdisciplinary collaboration.
Many of the works above, especially the Handbook of Transdisciplinary Research, provide case studies of team research. See also the special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Volume: 39, Number: 4 (December 2014), Transdisciplinary Environmental Science: Problem-oriented Projects and Strategic Research Programs. http://www.maneyonline.com/toc/isr/39/4?ai=xq&ui=1yg&af=T The volume contains various case studies of cooperation between natural and social scientists associated with the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research --UFZ, Leipzig.
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