2017), and costs and lack of incentives (Schuitema and Sintov 2017) are noted as challenges for interdisciplinary initiatives. 2012), communication gap among disciplines and longer required timeframe (Milman et al. Additionally, ranking of journals (Rafols et al. Personal motivations and interests of researchers, enjoyment of working within multidisciplinary team settings and potential impacts on society are further noted as drivers of such research (Milman et al. Studies further identify funding availability, professional issues, team characteristic, epistemological orientation, scope of research problems and institutional characteristic as factors that influence interdisciplinary research engagements (Porter et al. Recent statistics also show that researchers from some countries demonstrate higher interest in interdisciplinary research compared with investigators from other countries (Van Noorden 2015). For instance, there is an evidence that demographic attributes of researchers like gender and work experience can characterise engagements in interdisciplinary research (Van Rijnsoever and Hessels 2011). Simultaneously, literature has also pointed out various issues that motivate and deter interdisciplinary undertakings. ![]() Recent literature has emphasised on the importance of interdisciplinary research in solving many contemporary societal and research problems (Khan et al. Interdisciplinary research enables inputs from multiple domains, which eventually facilitates in developing novel conceptual and methodological frameworks to provide extraordinary solutions for many current societal issues (Barthel and Seidl 2017). Solutions of such problems are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice. ![]() A similar view is posed by the Australian Research Council (ARC), which notes interdisciplinary research as those involving investigators across disciplines for solving a problem or providing different perspectives to a problem as well those that involve one or more researchers applying approaches utilised across disciplines or outcomes from different disciplines to solve problems or issues (Australian Research Council 2016). ![]() The National Science Foundation of the USA define interdisciplinary research as a mode of research, conducted by teams or individuals, by integrating different methodological perspectives (e.g., information, data, techniques and tools), concepts and/or theories from two or more disciplines to solve problems (National Science Foundation 2020). This type of research is very important in addressing many real-life problems where a joint effort from experts working in multiple research domains is required. Interdisciplinary research has become increasingly common in recent days. Overall, the network-based visualisation reveals that research interdisciplinarity is implemented in a heterogeneous way across STEM and non-STEM disciplines, and there are gaps in inter-disciplinary collaborations among some disciplines. For projects entailing interdisciplinarity between STEM and non-STEM disciplines, the STEM discipline of Medical and Health Sciences and the non-STEM disciplines of Psychology and Cognitive Science and Studies in Human Societies appear as the leading contributors. By contrast, non-STEM interdisciplinary research is led by three disciplines- Studies in Human Societies, Language, Communication and Culture, and History and Archaeology. It is noted that the disciplines Engineering, Biological Sciences and Technology appear as the principal disciplines in interdisciplinary research having a STEM focus. Applying network analytics, this study investigates the contribution of individual disciplines in the successfully funded projects. This study considers metadata of the research projects funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Grant Project scheme. It is also unclear whether the dominant role of disciplines vary between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and non-STEM focused research. ![]() However, there is a lack of evidence in literature regarding which disciplines play dominant roles in interdisciplinary research settings. Research collaboration among interdisciplinary teams has become a common trend in recent days.
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