Investigating Interdisciplinary Research Discourse: the case of Global Environmental Change

现在人们普遍认为，许多现实世界的问题最好由多个学科共同解决，而不是由单个学科单独解决。在英国，研究委员会促进跨学科研究活动，大学反过来鼓励学者与其他学科的同事合作。然而，对于不同领域的研究人员来说，合作并不总是那么容易，因为每个学科都有自己的工作方法、期望、价值体系、说话和写作方式，这些都是该学科特有的，不容易共享。我们认为，对于机构、研究委员会和研究人员来说，更全面地了解跨学科研究中的话语实践的特点以及它们与传统学科中的话语实践的区别是很重要的。作为实现这一目标的一步，我们建议调查一个跨学科领域的成功期刊的话语：环境变化。我们将研究该领域作为一个统一整体运作的程度，该领域的期刊作者将其信息扩展到多学科受众的程度，以及该领域的每个学科保持独立身份的程度。为了调查这一领域，我们将分析《全球环境变化》杂志。我们将纳入该杂志自1990年创刊以来发表的每一篇文章。我们使用的主要方法是语料库语言学，即使用专门的软件来分析大量的书面文本。使用语料库技术对个别学科进行的许多研究已经存在，但这些技术尚未应用于跨学科领域。我们将使用一种方法来描述文本的语言特征，这将使我们能够根据文本在语言概况中的相关程度对文本进行聚类；这种方法由道格拉斯·比伯提出，被称为“多维分析”。此外，我们将研究该领域文本的重复短语，然后将具有相似短语特征的文本聚类。使用多维聚类和短语聚类，我们将看到文本是否遵循学科边界聚类。这是一种基于语料库的研究话语调查的创新方法：我们将根据文本内部特征对文本进行分组，而不是根据外部标准（例如，根据“学科”）将文本分类。我们还将研究引文实践（作者是否倾向于在其学科范围内引用？）以及作者和读者如何在文本中得到体现（例如，作者是否将其读者称为该学科的专家？）我们将比较我们对该期刊中跨学科研究话语的调查结果，将其与其他期刊的文本样本进行比较，其中五个代表其他跨学科领域，五个代表特定学科。这将使我们能够确定跨学科研究话语是否在其特征上是独特的，也可以看到跨学科领域之间和学科内部的话语实践有多少变化。随着时间的推移，我们将观察这一点，看看话语实践是否会随着一个领域的建立和跨学科社区的发展而改变。为了补充我们对文本的分析，我们还将对期刊出版过程中涉及的人员进行调查和访谈：编辑、审稿人和作者。这些数据可以帮助我们解释我们在文本中观察到的一些现象；例如，编辑政策的影响，或者来自不同学科的作者合作撰写文本的方式。这项工作将通过增加我们对跨学科研究话语的理解来支持英国的研究基础设施。

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.