For this paper I wanted to explore scholarly communications in interdisciplinary departments. Having completed a MA in an interdisciplinary field in 2019 and observing how interdisciplinary programs are becoming more popular at universities in the past decade, I wondered how a shift away from sharp divisions between traditional scholarly fields impacts scholarly communications. Since many interdisciplinary departments are relatively idiosyncratic and the literature on each is thin or nonexistent, instead of focusing on one field (such as Latin American Studies or Gender and Women’s Studies) I read articles on the challenges presented by different interdisciplinary programs with the goal of finding overarching themes.
One of the main problems presented by interdisciplinarity is the lack of shared technical language, core texts, methodologies and certain scholarly norms that are usually part of socialization within a given discipline. Writing or collaborating across disciplines means grappling with a higher diversity of ideas, backgrounds and norms which can lead to instability or difficulty in communicating. This requires a higher degree of grounding and explanation in scholarly communication than a researcher might normally have to employ for presenting research solely within their own field.
Interdisciplinarity has also meant an increase in citations outside of the author’s field, as shown in Hammarfelt’s 2011 citation analysis of literature studies journals. Hammarfelt’s findings, that authors in the humanities cited outside their discipline more often than in the 1980s, and increasingly looked to the social sciences in particular. This shift in citation patterns requires that authors read more widely, and disrupts some fundamental assumptions about scholarly communications, including that authors may largely stick to their field and humanities researchers need not keep up with social science journals and research trends. In short, journals focused on disciplines may no longer be providing academics within those disciplines with the necessary breadth of scholarship to produce high quality research. Instead, academics may have to turn to other discipline’s journals or abandon the idea of the journal as a valuable aggregator and look to databases instead.
In a similar way, conferences may also no longer satisfy researcher needs for in-person networking and formal and informal communications if they are limited to one field of study. And researchers producing interdisciplinary studies may have a hard time finding peer reviewers familiar with blended theories or methodologies, as well as journals interested in publishing them (Gullbekk & Byström 2019). Overall the rise of interdisciplinary fields of study and the popularity of interdisciplinary research and collaboration in general challenge the basic framework of scholarly communication that has traditionally been subdivided by fields.
Gullbekk, E. (2016). Apt information literacy? A case of interdisciplinary scholarly communication. Journal of Documentation, 72(4), 716–736. https://doi.org/10.1108/JDOC-08-2015-0101
Gullbekk, E., & Byström, K. (2019). Becoming a scholar by publication – PhD students citing in interdisciplinary argumentation. Journal of Documentation, 75(2), 247–269. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/10.1108/JD-06-2018-0101
Hammarfelt, B. (2011). Interdisciplinarity and the intellectual base of literature studies: Citation analysis of highly cited monographs. Scientometrics, 86(3), 705–725. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-010-0314-5
I, Sara Kittleson, have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion BEFORE looking at anyone else's work on this assignment.