BU Research Blog

Congratulations to Dr. Shanti Shanker in BU’s Department of Psychology and Dr. Pramod Regmi in the Department of Nursing Science on their paper ‘The Interdisciplinary Team Not the Interdisciplinarist: Reflections on Interdisciplinary Research’ which was accepted over the weekend by the journal Europasian Journal of Medical Sciences.  This interesting paper is co-authored with two BU Visiting Faculty, Ms. Jillian Ireland, Professional Midwifery Advocate in Poole Maternity Hospital (University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust) and Prof. Padam Simkhada based at the University of Huddersfield.  Co-author Dr. Sharada Wasti is also based the University of Huddersfield.

With interdisciplinary research growing in popularity, researchers, lecturers, journal editors and funders to consider how this is going to work in reality.   This paper argues that interdisciplinary working is with in the team, not ‘in a person’.  Multidisciplinary teams provide unique opportunities for researchers from different disciplines (and hence different ways of working and thinking) to collaborate with one another.  We need to be careful not to try to create interdisciplinarists, or at least, not too many.  We need people who are strong in their discipline and open-minded/flexible/reflective enough to see the value of other people’s disciplines.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health)

Reference:

1. Shanker, S., Wasti, S.P., Ireland, J., Regmi, P., Simkhada, P., van Teijlingen, E. (2021) The Interdisciplinary Team Not the Interdisciplinarist: Reflections on Interdisciplinary Research, Europasian Journal of Medical Sciences 3(2):1-5.