Abstract Cross‐disciplinary research is a priority for many academic institutions, with a growing body of scholarship dedicated to studying the central practice of cross‐disciplinarity: integration, or the synthesis of knowledge, information, and data across disciplines and domains. Discussions on this topic are regularly published in JASIST and ARIST and are of interest to ARIST readership because of the centrality of information to definitions of integration. Emerging challenges in this area are that (1) cross‐disciplinary integration practices are not only discussed by information scholars, but in fragmented, rarely overlapping discourses across domains, and (2) despite being linked to information, cross‐disciplinary integration is rarely explicitly positioned as an information practice. In this review, to respond to these challenges, I adopt critical interpretive synthesis methods to review the literature on cross‐disciplinary integration. I consolidate definitions of integration across 12 areas of scholarship and highlight the roles of information in these definitions. I find that certain areas of work are more likely to describe integration as the homogenization of disparate datasets, while others describe integration as a synthesis of knowledge or perspectives, and that the relationship between these integrative activities—for example, how combination of multi‐source datasets can support interdisciplinary conclusions—is rarely explored in depth. I identify concepts from the information sciences that offer ways forward to address this knowledge gap, and suggest roles for information practitioners in supporting integrative work.
Ciara Zogheib (Sun,) studied this question.