Interdisciplinary publishing: a personal view

A recent article discussed the importance of writing for a broader audience, of publishing not just research papers in peer-reviewed journals but also articles in science magazines or even in newspapers. Through such an article, you might also reach a scientist from another discipline; after all, outside our narrow specialization, we are the general public.

Tracking such a simple statistic as the average number of authors per one research paper shows a clear trend, namely that the average number has been steadily increasing. Probing such data reveals a few other trends too, including the growing heterogeneity among authors not only in terms of location and ethnicity but also in terms of specialities. How does this come about? One factor is probably that cutting-edge research at present is invariably multidisciplinary and nearly always corporate, requiring skills and knowledge that any single individual is unlikely to possess. One of the books I am reading at present is In Search of Memory: the emergence of a new science of mind by Eric Kandel. The book is a fascinating account of the author’s search for the biological basis of long-term memory. The connection between the book and this article is that at nearly every stage of research, spanning several decades, Kandel describes how he was benefitted from the skills and perspectives of the members of his research team.

The split between the sciences and the humanities is not new; indeed, C P Snow’s The Two cultures (both the lecture and the book) go back to the 1950s. Yet, I am not persuaded that what is needed to bring the two groups together is educational intervention, especially in the digital 21st century with its easy access to information. The multidisciplinary and large research teams, keener competition among these teams, and easy access to information, to my mind, go a long way in bridging gaps among diverse specialities: after all, a published paper is the proverbial tip of the iceberg; the cross-fertilization of ideas, the shop talk among members of a single research team, and the effect of the innate curiosity that drives scientists are all hidden from view.