Biography assessment criteria indicators

By Ismael Rafols

Indicators of interdisciplinarity are increasingly requested. Yet efforts to make aggregate indicators have repeatedly failed due to the diversity and ambiguity of understandings of the notion of interdisciplinarity. What if, instead of universal indicators, a contextualised process of indicating interdisciplinarity was used?

In this blog post I briefly explore the failure of attempts to identify universal indicators and the importance of moving from indicatORS to indicatING. By this I mean: An assessment of specific interdisciplinary projects or programs for indicating where and how interdisciplinarity develops as a process, given the particular understandings relevant for the specific policy goals.

This reflects the notion of directionality in research and innovation, which is gaining hold in policy. Namely, in order to evaluate research, analyses need go beyond quantity (scalars: unidimensional indicators) and to take into account the orientations of the research contents (vectors: indicatING).

The failure of universal indicators of interdiscipli

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