Multiple actors, multiple settings, multiple criteria: issues in assessing interdisciplinary research

The question of how to assess interdisciplinary research is made more complex by the existence of multiple actors making multiple decisions in multiple organizational settings. These settings include government officials charged with allocating or evaluating public expenditures in political environments increasingly demanding measures of accountability and performance; academic and laboratory administrators engaged in choosing among fields of science and modes of research organization; and researchers engaged in evaluating proposal and manuscript submissions within and across disciplines. Drawing on observations from the United States, the paper describes the interaction among these multiple but linked sets of decisions and decision makers, pointing to the existence of multiple, context-dependent measures of the quality of interdisciplinary research. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.