Fostering Collaboration: Breaking Down Silos to Strengthen Institutional Impact
What does it mean to do interdisciplinary research? Is it recruiting faculty and researchers who are experts in different fields or faculty from different disciplines to work on a common problem?
Collaboration comes with challenges. Encouraging collaboration without threatening historical discipline boundaries, evaluating the performance of individuals who straddle disciplines, providing resources, and measuring progress.
Many universities have researchers who have joint appointments in two departments. There are hurdles with joint appointments, especially when an individual has to satisfy the standards of two different departments when it comes to promotion and performance evaluations. For example, computer scientists present their findings at conferences while biologists publish in journals. Being able to identify researchers at other institutions with a similar profile provides comparable metrics. Academic Analytics has tools to help with this.
Another approach to collaboration has been to establish research centers that appoint faculty from different disciplines to work on a shared initiative or problem. These research centers can be within an institution or a separate entity that includes researchers affiliated with different universities. An example of the former is the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT which includes faculty from Electrical Engineering, Physics and Materials Science and Engineering. The Broad Institute in Cambridge provides facilities to faculty and researchers from MIT and Harvard.
It can be difficult to measure interdisciplinary collaboration. Rather than just comparing performance within an institution, having the ability to identify similar scientists at other institutions can be a powerful tool. Academic Analytics provides tools such as thematic mapping that identify research clusters. and collaboration indicators showing co-authorships.
Academic Analytics also provides the ability to identify new opportunities to collaborate that are useful when an institution decides to use resources to embark on a major initiative. With the right data, academic leaders can identify overlapping research themes, complementary expertise, and strategic intersections that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Academic Analytics have thematic mapping tools that allow institution to identify faculty and researchers from different disciplines. For example, there are faculty and researchers from architecture, engineering, physics, biology, computer science, economics and political science who work on aspects sustainability and climate change.
Some of the most consequential research does not start with institutional initiatives, but with individual researchers and faculty who have an idea, theory or problem. Finding other faculty and researchers who are interested in the same problem is not as easy as bumping into them in the hall. Academic analytics provides tools such as faculty research profiles, leadership dashboards and thematic mapping that can bring scientists together. These tools help ignite collaboration and track over time.
Although there has long been interdisciplinary research, there’s increasing emphasis on collaboration and its importance in relation to advancing innovation and scientific discovery. A recent example of this recognition is the November 2024, Times Higher Education worldwide ranking. In conjunction the Schmidt Science Fellows, THE released the first ever Interdisciplinary science ranking of universities. This ranking uses 11 metrics to measure collaboration within and between universities. Academic Analytics has many tools that can help institutions who want to be included in this ranking.
The innovation your institution is searching for may already exist—it just hasn’t been connected yet. When universities make collaboration intentional, supported, and visible, they unlock the full power of their faculty’s expertise.
Breaking down internal silos doesn’t just strengthen academic culture—it accelerates impact, attracts external funding, and prepares institutions to address the complex, interdisciplinary problems that define the future of higher education.
