Best Practices for Interdisciplinarity

该项目的目的是通过识别，检查和推荐其发展的最佳实践来推进社会和行为科学的跨学科。人们普遍注意到，跨社会和行为科学的创新跨学科倡议，如果能够得到实施和持续，可能产生变革性结果。有一些成功的具体例子，但增加或扩大跨学科工作的挑战很少得到满足——无论是对研究管理人员、学者和教师，还是对研究生。将成立一个跨学科的工作队，收集和传播促进跨学科研究和教学的最佳做法。该工作组将重点关注大学最佳实践的程序方面——包括教师参与这项工作的激励（和抑制）、有效维持这项工作的组织结构、在学科之间和学科内部传播成果的方法、有助于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。并与学科协会合作。研究结果将通过学科协会、学术部门、美国科学促进会等社团和美国大学协会等研究副校长网络广泛传播。这个项目的一个关键优点是它强调跨学科的实践，这些实践是连续的，可以由所涉及的机构实施，并且与建立持续的研究职业相兼容。更广泛的影响将来自于积极的项目，以传播在这一努力中所学到的知识，当然，跨学科的学术研究和教学也将从它们的采用中得到改善。

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.