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Few research fields play major role in interdisciplinary grant success

Scientometrics volume 119, pages 237–246 (2019)Cite this article

Abstract

Interdisciplinary research is vital in addressing complex real-world problems. To understand how the scientific workforce is being engaged in the interdisciplinary research, it is important to track the involvement of different research fields over time and the grants that drive the research endeavour. Unfortunately, there has been very little work in this understanding of interdisciplinary research and grant success. In this paper, we analysed the contribution of different disciplines within multidisciplinary research that secured grants. We tracked these contributions over a 10-year period to understand how different research fields evolved over time and played roles in interdisciplinary grant success. We followed a basic statistical approach and proposed a network-based approach to understand relative participation of different disciplines. We found disparities within different disciplines which showed that only few research fields contributed more in the interdisciplinary research grant success.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Complex Systems Research Group, Faculty of Engineering and IT, The University of Sydney, Darlington, NSW, 2008, Australia

    Arif Khan & Shahadat Uddin

  2. Distributed Systems Group, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, 33620, USA

    Nazim Choudhury

Authors
  1. Arif Khan
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  2. Nazim Choudhury
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  3. Shahadat Uddin
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Contributions

AK conducts majority of the data analysis and leads the writing of the manuscript. NC contributes in data analysis and writing. SU conceptualises the research problem, and contributes both in data analysis and writing.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shahadat Uddin.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Khan, A., Choudhury, N. & Uddin, S. Few research fields play major role in interdisciplinary grant success. Scientometrics 119, 237–246 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03043-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03043-w

Keywords

  • Interdisciplinary research
  • Field of research code
  • Grant success