Interdisciplinarity is the academic focus on the spaces between traditional disciplines. In formal study, this is called interdisciplinary studies, and the researchers interdisciplinarians. Like any other discipline, it has its own unique methodologies and terminology. This can make it difficult to discuss without a brief introduction. This page exists to communicate the nature and purpose of interdisciplinarity for those whose questions don't fit into a single academic field.

Interdisciplines

An interdiscipline is the result of interdisciplinary study, which is formal analysis of a question (or set of questions) that requires the perspectives of multiple disciplines. In effect, many "standard" academic disciplines can be considered interdisciplines, in the same sense that everything we know builds from something else we know or knew:

• Biochemistry, most obviously, builds from biology and chemistry.
• Linguistics builds from philology, mathematics, physics, sociology, and anthropology (among many others).
• Economics builds from mathematics, business, finance, and political science.
• Computer Science builds from physics, mathematics, and engineering.
• Humanities builds from philosophy, anthropology, history, classics, philology, linguistics, political science, and economics.

These disciplines are all taught at major universities, though—so what makes an interdiscipline different from a discipline? It's the same relationship that exists between a pidgin and a creole:

pidgin |?pij?n|
noun [often as adj. ]: a grammatically simplified form of a language, used for communication between people not sharing a common language. Pidgins have a limited vocabulary, some elements of which are taken from local languages, and are not native languages, but arise out of language contact between speakers of other languages (New Oxford American Dictionary).

Creole |?kr???l|
noun: a mother tongue formed from the contact of two languages through an earlier pidgin stage (New Oxford American Dictionary).

When two mutually unintelligible language communities must interact, they tend to form a pidgin to do so. When a child is born speaking that pidgin natively, that new speech variety is then called a creole. By this same pattern, new academic disciplines are formed from existing disciplines by way of interdisciplines.

When an interdisciplinarian has a question which isn't adequately addressed by a single academic discipline, she or he can integrate two or more existing disciplines into a new, more holistic view on his or her questions. That process of integration forms an interdiscipline. When enough researchers are studying that same question that a set of standard terminology and accepted research methodologies is developed, that interdiscipline can then be called a discipline.

These lines aren't black-and-white, though: what one university calls a discipline, another may call an interdiscipline. Both can be "correct" in their terminology, as the differences between the two can emerge entirely from the research landscape at a given institution.

Interdisciplinary Research and Writing

There are a wide array of texts on interdisciplinary research, and a few on interdisciplinary writing. These are some of the more common ones:

• Atkinson, J. (2006). Interdisciplinary Research: Diverse Approaches in Science,Technology, Health and Society
• Klein, J. T. (1991). Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice.
• Klein, J. T. (2005). Humanities, Culture, And Interdisciplinarity: The Changing American Academy.
• Lattuca, L. R. (2001). Creating Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary Research and Teaching among College and University Faculty
• Moran, J. (2001). Interdisciplinarity: The New Critical Idiom.
• Repko, A. F. (2008). Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory.

If you need to write an interdisciplinary paper, or you are teaching a course in which your students will be writing interdisciplinary papers, I have put together a quick template to guide the writing process:

This template is in the public domain, which means you don't have to ask my permission to use it in your course or for your paper. Feel free to download it, modify it, re-upload it somewhere else, link to it, or use it to help scaffold your own thesis.

If you use this template in your course or other online resource, please do not link directly to the template file itself. Rather, linking to this page will allow your reference to keep pace with any updates or modifications made to the template.