Best Practices for Interdisciplinarity

该项目的目的是通过确定、检查和推荐发展社会和行为科学的最佳实践，促进社会和行为科学的跨学科发展。跨社会科学和行为科学的创新跨学科倡议如果能够得到实施和维持，将有可能产生变革性的结果，这一点被广泛注意到。有一些成功的具体例子，但增加或扩大跨学科工作的挑战太少遇到--无论是对研究行政人员、学者和教师，还是对研究生。将成立一个本身跨学科的特别工作组，收集和传播促进跨学科研究和教学的最佳做法。特别工作组将侧重于大学最佳实践的程序性方面，包括激励(和抑制)教师从事这项工作，有效维持这项工作的组织结构，跨学科和学科内传播由此产生的学术成果的方法，帮助维持跨学科工作的过程，教育学生和学者以跨学科方法有效工作的技术，以及与学科协会合作的联盟。结果将通过学科协会、学术部门以及美国科学促进会等协会和研究副总裁网络(如美国大学协会)广泛传播。该项目的一个主要优点是它强调跨学科实践，这些实践是连续的，可以由所涉机构实施，并与建立持续的研究事业相兼容。传播在这一努力中学到的知识的积极计划将产生更广泛的影响，当然，随后还将从采用它们所带来的跨学科学术和教学的改善中产生影响。

The purpose of this project is to advance interdisciplinarity in the social and behavioral sciences by identifying, examining, and recommending best practices for its development. The potential for transformative results from innovative interdisciplinary initiatives across the social and behavioral sciences, if they could be implemented and sustained, is widely noted. There are specific examples of success, but the challenges of mounting or expanding interdisciplinary work have too infrequently been met -- whether for research administrators, for scholars and teachers, and for graduate students.A Task Force, itself interdisciplinary, will be formed to collect and disseminate best practices for promoting interdisciplinary research and teaching. The task force will focus on the procedural side of best practices at universities - including incentives (and disincentives) for faculty to engage in this work, the organizational structures that are effective in sustaining it, ways to disseminate resulting scholarship across and within the disciplines, processes that help to sustain interdisciplinary work, techniques to educate students and scholars to work effectively in an interdisciplinary approaches, and collaborate alliances with disciplinary associations. Results will be widely disseminated through disciplinary associations, to academic departments, and through societies such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science and networks of research vice-presidents, such as that at the American Association of Universities.A key merit of this project is its emphasis on interdisciplinary practices that are successive, can be implemented by the institutions addressed, and are compatible with building sustained research careers. Broader impacts will follow from the active program to disseminate what is learned in this effort, and of course then from improved interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching that will flow from their adoption.