LibGuides: Savvy Scholar Workshops: Interdisciplinary Research Strategies

Interdisciplinary Research Strategies

Please find here presentation slides and additional resources for constructing competent multi-disciplinary research...

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Gale E-Books This link opens in a new window
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Collection of ebook reference works in all disciplines including multivolume encyclopedias, biographical directories, business plan handbooks, consumer health references, dictionaries, etc.
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Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
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Over 400 reference titles from over 70 publishers covering every major subject. Seamless searching of Credo Reference sources, the WSU Libraries Catalog, and other Libraries subscribed databases.
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Video tour of Credo Reference
SAGE Knowledge This link opens in a new window
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Portal to access CQ Press, Sage Reference Online and provides access to the following academic book collections: SAGE 2011, 2013-2014 Encyclopedia Collection, the 2011, 2013-2014 Handbook Collection and the Complete Books, Reference and Navigator Collection 2015.
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SAGE Research Methods This link opens in a new window
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A tool allowing researchers to explore methods concepts in over 175,000 pages of SAGE's book, journal and reference content. This can help with designing research projects, understanding particular methods or identifying a new methods, conducting research, and writing up findings. It can be used as a cross-disciplinary source across the social sciences, health sciences, and more.
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Works best in Chrome or Firefox.

Concept Mapping Tools
Concept mapping, or mind mapping, is a great way to organize your research. Use it to brainstorm keywords, and to keep track of the databases you've tried or want to search.
Library Homepage (use the SmartSearch Advanced Search option)

Interdisciplinary & Multidisciplinary Research Help

Research as Inquiry: Researching is a complex and messy human activity in relation to the world. It is a process of discovering questions and asking them in increasingly complex ways (with others!) in order to develop new questions and lines of inquiry in any field...
Searching Strategically: Locating information requires a combination of exploration, inquiry, discovery, serendipity and dialogue. Information discovery is nonlinear and iterative, requiring use of a broad range of information sources, critical openness, and flexibility.
Authority is Constructed & Contextual: Authority depends upon the source and origin of the resources, the information needs, and the contexts in which the information will be used. This authority is viewed with an attitude of informed skepticism and openness to new perspectives.
Information Creation is a Process: The production of information, its communities of practice, discourses and methods, formats, access and dissemination are creative, collaborative and influential processes for research, scholarship, and evaluation.
Information has Value: The creation of information requires commitments of time, complexity of thought and a variety of resources. Information may be valued more or less based on its creators, its audience and community, its format and message. In light of the complexity of questions, resources, "authorities" and world, evaluating information is an essential and ongoing aspect of research.
Scholarship is Conversation: Scholarship is sustained discourse within communities, a participatory and collaborative dialogue searching new insights and discoveries among competing and converging perspectives and interpretations.

About the Framework
Theory & Practice of Research visualized
About Interdisciplinarity - Concepts, Methods, Practices
Resources, tools & recommendations from the Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (http://wwwp.oakland.edu/ais/).
Association for Interdisciplinary Studies - Oakland University
The Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (formerly Association for Integrative Studies) is an interdisciplinary professional organization founded in 1979 to promote the interchange of ideas among scholars and administrators in all of the arts and sciences on intellectual and organizational issues related to furthering integrative studies. Incorporated as a non-profit educational association in the State of Ohio, it has an international membership.

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge. Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page. In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls "flatness." Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott's novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of "upwards," Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.
ISBN: 9780674744431
Publication Date: 2015-04-20

Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies by Allen F Repko
This comprehensive new introduction to interdisciplinary studies draws on recent advances in the field's burgeoning literature on learning and assessment. It is the first book to present these foundational principles in a textbook designed specifically for the introductory course. The book introduces students to the principles of the field, prepares them to produce quality work, and facilitates their working with topics, problems, or themes that span multiple disciplines. Its approach is succinct, conceptual, and practical.

Interdisciplinary Research by Allen F. Repko; Richard (Rick) Szostak The Third Edition of Interdisciplinary Research: Process and Theory offers a comprehensive and systematic presentation of the interdisciplinary research process and the theory that informs it. Authors Allen F. Repko and Rick Szostak illustrate each step of the decision-making process by drawing on student and professional work from the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and applied fields. Designed for active learning and problem-based approaches as well as for more traditional approaches, the book now includes more examples from real student research projects and adds more tables and figures to enliven the discussion.
ISBN: 9781506330488
Publication Date: 2016-05-05
Case Studies in Interdisciplinary Research by William H. Newell; Rick Szostak; Allen F. Repko
ISBN: 1412982480
Publication Date: 2011-02-07
This book is intended as a "stand alone" volume that (1) demonstrates the need for using an explicitly interdisciplinary approach to problems that span multiple disciplines, (2) applies interdisciplinary theory and best practices to a particular set of problems, (3) shows the importance of first creating common ground among conflicting expert views before performing integration, and (4) produces new understandings of these problems that are practical, purposeful, and deeply informed by disciplinary expertise.
Interdisciplinarity by Julie T. Klein
ISBN: 0814320872
Publication Date: 1990-03-01
In this volume, Julie Klein provides the first comprehensive study of the modern concept of interdisciplinarity, supplementing her discussion with the most complete bibliography yet compiled on the subject.
The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity by Julie Thompson Klein; Carl Mitcham; Robert Frodeman
ISBN: 9780199236916
Publication Date: 2010-08-20
The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity provides a synoptic overview of the current state of interdisciplinary research, education, administration and management, and problem solving-knowledge that spans the disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, and crosses the space between the academic community and society at large.
Transdisciplinarity by Basarab Nicolescu
ISBN: 9781572738355
Publication Date: 2008-03-01
In this fascinating volume, the contributors make it very clear that far from being a faddish and superficial phenomenon, transdisciplinarity is potentially the foundation for a new, and much needed, approach to inquiry.

Find more library resources on Interdisciplinary Research Methods and Practices HERE