Publikationen

Today's complex scientific problems often require interdisciplinary, team-oriented approaches: the expertise of researchers from different disciplines is needed to collaboratively reach a solution. Interdisciplinary teams yet face many challenges such as differences in research practice, terminology, communication , and in the usage of tools. In this paper, we therefore study concrete mechanisms and tools of two real-world scientific projects with the aim to examine their efficacy and influence on interdisciplinary teamwork. For our study, we draw upon Bronstein's model of interdisciplinary collaboration. We found that it is key to use suitable environments for communication and collaboration, especially when teams are geographically distributed. Plus, the willingness to share (domain) knowledge is not a given and requires strong common goals and incentives. Besides, structural barriers such as financial aspects can hinder interdisciplinary work, especially in applied, industry funded research. Furthermore, we observed a kind of cold-start problem in interdisciplinary collaboration, when there is no work history and when the disciplines are rather different, e.g. in terms of wording. HowTo: Scientific Work in Interdisciplinary and Distributed Teams (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282813815_HowTo_Scientific_Work_in_Interdisciplinary_and_Distributed_Teams [accessed Jul 13, 2017].