Can academic prenups help overcome barriers to interdisciplinary research?

Interdisciplinary teams face specific challenges, not least of which is the difficulty of establishing a shared vision among sometimes fundamentally different academic disciplines that all speak their own language. For example, talking about an agent means one thing to a computer modeller and something different to a software engineer.

Compromising on disciplinary desirables to elevate the overall quality of the synthesis represents another challenge. This requires researchers to acknowledge difficult positionalities and readiness to retreat from ownership of activities so structural inequalities can be addressed.

Then there’s who is credited for what when it comes to outputs and managing scholarly peer review of interdisciplinary research for publication or funding. Evaluation becomes difficult when multiple disciplinary standards and criteria need to be reconciled. Interdisciplinary research, even when delivered successfully, often makes slow progress, and longer publication and citation times can mean depressed productivity (with implications for career progression), which can leave a sense of dissatisfaction among interdisciplinary researchers.

Interdisciplinary ‘prenups’ to overcome barriers in interdisciplinary research 

A bold approach to the challenges of interdisciplinary research could be interdisciplinary “prenups”, as proposed in a recent article in EMBO Reports. An interdisciplinary team of researchers, including myself, offer practical guidelines to developing an interdisciplinary ecosystem, including targeting decision-making at the individual, team, organisation, funder and publisher levels. 

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In the article, the authors propose an agreement for interdisciplinary work as a bottom-up approach to mitigate some of the challenges of interdisciplinary research. This prenup would help to establish shared values, visions, objectives, risk appetites, communications protocols, publication strategies, intellectual property, academic impact, risks and opportunities. Creating a prenup would entail structured conversations among team members during the planning phase of the collaboration or project to identify reciprocal challenges and the mutual benefits to each discipline. Interdisciplinary teams can formalise the agreed outcomes of these discussions as foundational documents to govern decision-making, establish shared objectives and even resolve disputes. This will ensure researchers value each other and, especially, their contributions, rather than seeing interdisciplinary research as a set of transactions or a tick-box exercise.

Another issue this will overcome concerns the order of authors on scientific articles, which reflects the contribution of each author to the project. While the order varies across disciplines and cultures, typically the first and last position carry the most weight, and order is a key measure of the authors’ contributions, which eventually influences significant decisions such as promotions, securing tenure or appropriation of research grants. 

Given that, in interdisciplinary teams, the contributions of individual members do not stack against each other in sharp relief (unlike in single-discipline teams, where this is relatively easy to determine), disagreements around authorships represent a recurring motif in interdisciplinary research. Prenups can develop and outline an equitable strategy that alternates first and last authorships in a way that those with substantial contributions get due credit. For example, a research project that integrated clinical, engineering, software and biomedical approaches and yielded a virtual asthma patient credited multiple authors as “first authors”, “senior authors” and “corresponding authors” to fairly represent the contributions of the team members.

The prenup strategy was adopted by EVAL-FARMS: a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)-funded interdisciplinary project that integrated methods from mathematics, engineering, microbial sciences, anthropology and geography to address antimicrobial resistance in agriculture. The prenup, especially, ensured that publications were handled more equitably across the team.

Enhancing interdisciplinary research

It is clear to academics, funders and policymakers that the biggest issues our world faces will not be solved by individual disciplines, but by collaborations across them. This requires a fundamental rethink at the multiple stakeholder levels, from academics, research institutes, funders and publishers of how interdisciplinary research is funded, conducted, published and measured, including the assessment of interdisciplinary researchers’ contributions. 

The proposal to introduce prenups is just one of the solutions proposed in the paper that outlines seven recommendations for researchers, institutions, publishers and funders to enhance interdisciplinary research and output. As the authors state: “The underlying truth is that interdisciplinary collaborations require additional time, a collective willingness to revisit and reflect, patience in stepping into the unfamiliar and even sacrifices for the greater good.” Despite these challenges and the interdisciplinary path being non-linear, the opportunities are plentiful and always rewarding.

Himanshu Kaul is a Royal Academy of Engineering research fellow at the University of Leicester.