The five dilemmas of interdisciplinary research and how to deal with them: a review

Interdisciplinary research receives increasing attention from academics, research organizations, and funding bodies. It is seen as a promising avenue to develop novel insights. However, it is also considered to be more complicated to set up and to conduct successfully. To make the scattered literature on the subject accessible and to derive implications for both individual researchers and policy makers, we propose that interdisciplinary research can be conceptualized as a set of five dilemmas. Based on an extensive and systematic literature review of 137 research articles we present these dilemmas to better structure the main promises and pitfalls of interdisciplinary research. The value of conceptualizing interdisciplinary research this way is three-fold: (1) it makes existing research on the topic accessible as it structures the highly dispersed debates, (2) it provides implications for individual researchers active in an increasingly interdisciplinary academic environment, and (3) it supports research organizations and funding bodies in developing strategies to support an interdisciplinary research ecosystem. We also present a data preprocessing, exploration, and analysis framework in later sections of the report. This technical framework is aimed at accelerating studies of interdisciplinarity (and for testing our framework in follow-up studies) by streamlining common tasks such as data cleaning and enrichment, and automatic detection of interdisciplinary bodies of work in large bibliometric databases.