Investigating Interdisciplinary Research Discourse: the case of Global Environmental Change

It is generally accepted now that many real-world problems are best addressed by a number of disciplines working together rather than by individual disciplines alone. In the UK, research councils promote interdisciplinary research activity and universities in turn encourage academics to collaborate with colleagues in other disciplines.

It is not always easy, however, for researchers in different areas to cooperate, because each discipline has methods of working, expectations, value systems and ways of talking and writing that are special to that discipline and not easily shared. We believe that it is important for institutions, research councils and researchers to have a fuller understanding of what the distinctive features of discourse practices in interdisciplinary research are and of how they differ from discourse practices in conventional disciplines.

As a step toward this goal we propose investigating the discourse of a successful journal in an interdisciplinary field: Environmental Change. We will study the extent to which this field operates as a unified whole, the extent to which journal authors in the field broaden their messages to a multidisciplinary audience, and the extent to which each discipline in the field maintains a discrete identity. In order to investigate the field we will analyse the journal 'Global Environmental Change'.

We will include in our study every article published in the journal since its inception in 1990. The primary methodology we use is Corpus Linguistics, that is, using specialised software to analyse large quantities of written text. Many studies of individual disciplines, using corpus techniques, already exist, but these techniques have not yet been applied to an interdisciplinary field. We will use an approach to the description of the linguistic features of texts that will make it possible for us to cluster texts according to degrees of correlation in their linguistic profiles; this approach, developed by Douglas Biber, is called 'multidimensional analysis'. In addition, we will investigate the recurrent phraseologies of texts in this field and then cluster texts with similar phraseological profiles. Using both multidimensional and phraseological clusters, we will see whether the texts cluster following discipline boundaries. This is an innovative approach to corpus-based investigations of research discourse: instead of placing the texts into categories according to external criteria (for example, according to 'discipline'), we will group texts by text-internal features. We will also look at the citation practices (do authors tend to cite within their discipline?) and how writers and readers are represented in the texts (do writers address their readers as experts in their discipline, for example?).

We will compare the results of our investigation of the discourse of interdisciplinary research in that journal by comparing it to samples of texts taken from other journals, five representing other interdisciplinary fields and five representing specific disciplines. This will allow us to determine whether interdisciplinary research discourse is distinct in its features, and also to to see how much variation in discourse practices there may be between interdisciplinary fields and within disciplines. We will look at this across time, to see whether discourse practices change as a field becomes more established and as an interdisciplinary community develops.

To complement our analyses of texts, we will also conduct surveys and interviews of people involved in the journal publication process: editors, reviewers and authors. The data can help us to explain some of the phenomena that we observe in the texts; the influence of editorial policies, for example, or the ways that authors from different disciplines collaborate to write texts.

The work will support the research infrastructure in the UK by increasing our understanding of interdisciplinary research discourse.

There are four major user-groups for this research.

1) The research councils who advise on and implement government policy in relation to research funding:

For these groups, encouragement of interdisciplinary research is a major challenge; identifying and removing any obstacles to such research, and indeed identifying how such research is successfully carried out, would facilitate interdisciplinary endeavours. Our project will not do everything that would be needed to meet this aim but it will establish ways of working with interdisciplinary discourse that will be the foundation of future studies. Our research will inform the funding councils on the following questions: how easy do researchers in different disciplines find it to build on each others' work in carrying out their own? in an interdisciplinary field, of which Environmental Change is an example, to what extent are there differences in terminology (especially words and phrases which are the same in form but different in meaning) that are likely to cause problems of understanding? are the styles of papers written from the different disciplines similar enough to escape comment or different enough to cause problems of interpretation? what kind of training might researchers in the constituent disciplines of a novel interdisciplinary field need in order to facilitate cooperation? More importantly, perhaps, we will test our methods for answering these questions so that they can be applied to other interdisciplinary fields.

2) People involved in the publication of interdisciplinary research output, directly and indirectly:

These include commercial publishers (such as Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor and Francis) and the large numbers of researchers that act as editors, editorial board members and reviewers. More specifically, within these operations, the findings will interest: company staff with responsibility for managing IDR journals; the editors and the editorial boards; and the staff who assist in the provision of training and writing support to authors. The findings can inform editorial and publisher policy decisions, review processes and the guidance provided to authors.

3) Those involved in conducting or managing IDR, within academia and in commercial research centres:

Researchers who are entering IDR environments may not be aware of the communication challenges faced in IDR; the description of the features of ID discourse will help them to understand what the rhetorical demands of writing for a broader audience are. Similarly, managers of IDR activities, whether at a local project team level, or at the research centre level, will benefit from the answers that we provide regarding training needs, and the possible obstacles to effective communication.

4) Teachers of Study Skills and English for Academic Purposes (EAP), many of whom work in service units within universities and prepare students particularly for postgraduate study and research:

A large proportion of their 'clients' are international students, who bring in substantial income to the UK as a whole, and upon whom the economic health of the Higher Education sector increasingly depends. In many cases, such students report that their work is interdisciplinary in scope and, furthermore, that they can experience difficulties meeting the demands of supervisors from different disciplines. EAP teachers make use of extant research into 'academic prose' in general and into the language and discourse of specific disciplines - this leaves them ill-prepared to respond to the needs of students undertaking interdisciplinary research. Our project will inform EAP and Study Skills teachers on the following question: what are the typical linguistic features and rhetorical practices of interdisciplinary research discourse?