Identifying Relevant Disciplines

How does an interdisciplinary researcher know which disciplines have insights into their research question? As we shall see under Searching the Existing Literature it is not straightforward to simply search a library for relevant insights. Indeed, different search techniques are often required for each discipline.

There are two complementary approaches here:

· Researchers can identify relevant disciplines through recourse to disciplinary perspective. Brief descriptions of many disciplinary perspectives are provided in Allen Repko, Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory (Sage: 2011).

· Or they can first identify relevant phenomena, theories, and methods, and then ask which disciplines study/employ these. They can then have recourse to the classifications developed in Phenomena Investigated in Human Science, Classifying Theories, and Classifying Methods

Undergraduate student researchers will generally wish to limit themselves to disciplines that have actively researched (some aspect of) the research question. More advanced researchers may find it valuable to reflect upon or perform the research that a discipline has not yet undertaken.