COMMENT: Engaging in interdisciplinarity should not be a luxury you can only ‘afford’ once you are at a senior level

This is an opinion piece, the views in the post are an expression of the writer's opinion. 

Recently, the Dean of the Faculty of Technical Sciences highlighted in a column in Omnibus how social science research has been portrayed on TV, in a news piece that seamlessly switched from reporting on the agricultural and technological aspects of the agrivoltaics (dual land use combining agricultural production and photovoltaic on the same piece of land, ed.) installations at AU Viborg to the social science research we have been doing. This was followed by a clear support of interdisciplinary research to solve the grand challenges in society.

The TV coverage of the results of an EU project came about because several researchers had a clear interdisciplinary mindset: Associate Professor Marta Victoria from the Department of Mechanical Engineering had suggested we do a press release on our joint paper spanning several disciplines. Professor Uffe Jørgensen from the Department of Agroecology, while walking the journalists around the solar panels in the rain, told the DR team that they should also make a stop at his colleagues from Aarhus BSS. I cleaned my afternoon calendar to talk to the journalists. Assistant Professor Gabriele Torma forwarded video files to the DR team even though being on holiday. And PhD student Alejandro Cordoba Ruiz dropped the pen at home, where he had been focusing on writing, to cycle over to BSS and help me showcasing the virtual reality tour of different agrivoltaics installations that Gabriele had used to study citizen perceptions, to the journalist team. 

The project Hyperfarm had brought together four departments at AU, and the AU team is really proud that we managed to combine cross-disciplinary insights into a peer reviewed publication.

Lack of system-incentives

In my double-faculty affiliation, I work on furthering such cross-faculty collaborations. I meet many interested researchers who are highly engaged and find interdisciplinarity meaningful and fun. But I also need to call out the barriers that I see, and an important one is lack of system-incentives. Researchers should engage in interdisciplinary research and the dissemination of such, because they find it meaningful and fun, but also because it’s part of their career. In any case, doing the first should not be a trade-off to the latter. And engaging in interdisciplinarity should not be a luxury you can only ‘afford’ once you are at a senior level. 

Getting back to the case of the joint publication that was featured on national TV, the publication is in a journal that does not count for us BSS researchers involved. Our part of BSS currently looks mainly at the 2024 edition of list of the AJG list by the Chartered Association of Business Schools, and here only level 3 and 4 are regarded as good or excellent. This does not leave much publication outlets for interdisciplinary research. Even though everybody, also at BSS, says they are in favour. 

It should be easier to publish jointly between faculties

Therefore, I would like to see more action in terms of a more diverse set of criteria for what good publications are, and a more diverse set of criteria of what good research and its societal impact is. The best would be if criteria are applicable cross-faculty, so that researchers can more easily publish jointly and more seamlessly move between faculties. In fact, the old BFI list had a rather equalizing effect, because it gave journals the same importance, no matter at which faculty you were. I do not know which list, instrument or metric should be used, but I am convinced the criteria should be a mix because no single indicator is perfect, and only a balance can get it right. 

I meet many researchers that are very interested in getting engaged in interdisciplinary research – but many also feel uncertain about what the impact is on their career and employment. This uncertainty is holding them back. My view is that there is a lot of opportunity for networking already, not least in a range of excellent interdisciplinary centres across AU. Thus, I do not think networking opportunities are lacking. Instead, I would like to see the researchers' interests matched by more top-down actions from AU management, setting the system-incentives on the right course towards making interdisciplinary research a good choice at all career stages and for a variety of reasons. 

Jessica Aschemann-Witzel is Professor at Department of Management, Director of the MAPP Centre at BSS, and affiliated with the Department of Agroecology as Joint Ambassador for Interdisciplinary Collaboration at Tech and Aarhus BSS.