Promoting Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration: A Systematic Review, a Critical Literature Review, and a Pathway Forward

Interdisciplinary research has been a topic of interest for many decades – perhaps longer. And yet, even now, there is still much we do not understand about how to stimulate collaboration across research disciplines. This article reports the results of a systematic review of the academic literature on strategies for promoting new interdisciplinary research collaborations, which returned only a very small number of empirical studies. A broader review of the scholarship in this area reveals a literature that is highly theorized, but not adequately operationalized for empirical investigation of how to enable new collaborations. A shift toward a better formulation of research questions, with a view toward generating more empirical data on practical strategies for connecting researchers and encouraging them to work together across disciplinary boundaries, will be required to further the research agenda on interdisciplinary collaboration.