Our aim in this commentary is to challenge one of the claims made by interdisciplinarity advocates: that disciplines are silos and, as such, hinder cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange. This claim is a central feature in interdisciplinarity advocates' rationale for promoting structural changes across universities and reallocating resources toward interdisciplinary research units and training programmes. We use citation practices to demonstrate that cross disciplinary communication occurs despite claims otherwise. Considering the overwhelming amount of data generated by bibliometric studies, we argue that knowledge exchange across disciplines is too large to be ignored and that the silo thesis should be re-examined. The longitudinal perspective adopted by bibliometricians also shows that cross-disciplinary communication is far from being a new trend, but to the contrary is a well-established practice among academic communities. We begin our commentary by briefly reviewing three widespread assumptions underpinning pro-interdisciplinary arguments: (1) disciplines' specialization hinders cross-disciplinary communication; (2) disciplines shun away from addressing real world problems; (3) disciplines are self-centred entities primarily competing for academic authority. We conclude our commentary by suggesting that a better understanding of the benefits and limits of interdisciplinarity requires moving away from broad statements about the alleged insularity of disciplines and openness of interdisciplinarity.

ObjectiveThe San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) advocates for assessing biomedical research quality and impact, yet academic organizations continue to employ traditional measures such as Journal Impact Factor. We aimed to identify and prioritize measures for assessing research quality and impact.MethodsWe conducted a review of published and grey literature to identify measures of research quality and impact, which we included in an online survey. We assembled a panel of researchers and research leaders, and conducted a two-round Delphi survey to prioritize measures rated as high (rated 6 or 7 by ≥ 80% of respondents) or moderate (rated 6 or 7 by ≥ 50% of respondents) importance.ResultsWe identified 50 measures organized in 8 domains: relevance of the research program, challenges to research program, or productivity, team/open science, funding, innovations, publications, other dissemination, and impact. Rating of measures by 44 panelists (60%) in Round One and 24 (55%) in Round Two of a Delphi survey resulted in consensus on the high importance of 5 measures: research advances existing knowledge, research plan is innovative, an independent body of research (or fundamental role) supported by peer-reviewed research funding, research outputs relevant to discipline, and quality of the content of publications. Five measures achieved consensus on moderate importance: challenges to research productivity, potential to improve health or healthcare, team science, collaboration, and recognition by professional societies or academic bodies. There was high congruence between researchers and research leaders across disciplines.ConclusionsOur work contributes to the field by identifying 10 DORA-compliant measures of research quality and impact, a more comprehensive and explicit set of measures than prior efforts. Research is needed to identify strategies to overcome barriers of use of DORA-compliant measures, and to "de-implement" traditional measures that do not uphold DORA principles yet are still in use.

Countless books on interdisciplinarity have been published over the last 50 years. The Policies and Politics of Interdisciplinary Research by Severine Louvel, however, is of a different kind. Here, the author departs from both the celebratory literature on interdisciplinarity and the abundant ‘how to’ instructional reports on recommendations for successful interdisciplinary research centres and training programs. Instead, Louvel offers a critical perspective that will undoubtedly be of interest to STS scholars. She makes an original contribution to the literature on interdisciplinarity by examining the emergence and institutionalisation of nanomedicine in France and the United States. Louvel’s book comprises seven chapters, each of which examines key settings where interdisciplinary policies and knowledge politics intertwine. These settings (chapters) include funding programs and their impact on interdisciplinary groups; peer-reviewed journals; university research hubs; discourses around interdisciplinary research; the relationship between established disciplines and the nascent nanomedicine field. The book as a whole serves as a thematic exploration of the institutionalisation of nanomedicine rather than a sequential development of an idea; therefore, individual chapters can be read as part of the collection or independently. The richness of Louvel’s book precludes from trying to thoroughly address every aspect in this review. I will thus focus on the chapters making key contributions to the understanding of interdisciplinarity; specifically the ones that I found the most fascinating from my own standpoint (i.e. as a sociologist of knowledge interested in the relationship between disciplines and interdisciplines and in the rhetoric around interdisciplinarity). Louvel’s analytical ground is at the crossroads of science studies and the political sociology of science. She focuses her attention on the politics behind interdisciplinary policies. She frames interdisciplinarity as a mode of knowledge production socially constructed by organizations, actors, interest groups, etc., each with their unique vision, goal, and level of power. Louvel argues that current policies are creating a new sociopolitical order in academia, resulting in a redistribution of power between stakeholders. As she puts it, her goal is “to contribute to the critical studies of interdisciplinarity by investigating the economic, political and sociocultural purposes underlying interdisciplinary policies” (p. 16). Building on Frickel and Moore’s (2006) influential book, The new political sociology of science, the premise underpinning her work is that the understanding of science–and thus interdisciplinarity–needs to take into account the interplay between internal and external forces to the scientific field. Dissociating the scientific field from its social environment can only yield a partial understanding. Louvel’s book builds on a vast body of work on disciplines and interdisciplinarity. In the Introduction and Chapter 1, she brilliantly summarizes ongoing debates. The scope and depth of Louvel’s synthesis is worth mentioning. Her analysis is comprehensive such that even well-versed

In this study, we explore knowledge regimes shaping the ongoing transformation of medical identities. We accomplish this through a text-based analysis of published studies reporting on interventions into the membership, content, or process of morbidity and mortality rounds. Historically a site for physicians to discuss medical error, these rounds still feature strongly in efforts to improve patient safety. In this way, changes to morbidity and mortality rounds offer a window into shifting knowledge regimes being realized in clinical workplaces and sites of medical education. Following a systematic search process, our dataset included 54 studies published between 1992 and 2020. Using Foucault's concept of governmentality as a sensitizing device in our analysis of these texts, we found that morbidity and mortality rounds were being changed to align with the rationales and identities associated with evidence-based medicine, quality improvement/patient safety practices, or a combination of both. However, those combinations were not always smooth. In some ways, our analysis confirms the ongoing penetration of evidence-based medicine rationales in the profession of medicine. Our analysis also shows the competing dynamics of quality improvement and patient safety regimes. If the identities available for participants enrolled in evidence-based medicine include engaging as librarians or researchers, then the identities invited in the quality improvement/patient safety regimes centre around the notion of "safety scientists". The future question is whether these belief systems and associated knowledge practices compete, complement, or mix together in some new configuration. Ultimately, we argue for further explorations of the changing nature of knowledge practices and associated knowledge regimes intersecting with the profession of medicine.

Introduction The medical education research field operates at the crossroads of two distinct academic worlds: higher education and medicine. As such, this field provides a unique opportunity to explore new forms of cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange. Methods Cross-disciplinary knowledge flow in medical education research was examined by looking at citation patterns in the five journals with the highest impact factor in 2017. To grasp the specificities of the knowledge flow in medical education, the field of higher education was used as a comparator. In total, 2031 citations from 64 medical education and 41 higher education articles published in 2017 were examined. Results Medical education researchers draw on a narrower range of knowledge communities than their peers in higher education. Medical education researchers predominantly cite articles published in health and medical education journals (80% of all citations), and to a lesser extent, articles published in education and social science journals. In higher education, while the largest share of the cited literature is internal to the domain (36%), researchers cite literature from across the social science spectrum. Findings suggest that higher education scholars engage in conversations with academics from a broader range of communities and perspectives than their medical education colleagues. Discussion Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of doxa and field, it is argued that the variety of epistemic cultures entering the higher education research space contributes to its interdisciplinary nature. Conversely, the existence of a relatively homogeneous epistemic culture in medicine potentially impedes cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange.

Healthcare workers took center stage in the early unfolding drama of the COVID-19 pandemic. Subject to multiple demands, these workers embodied debates about the duties of professionals, the responsibilities of employers, and reasonable expectations of publics. These dynamics have long been of interest to sociologists studying professions. In this paper, we explore how healthcare workers were reorganized in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada. Using concepts of boundaries and boundary work, we analyzed the interface between employers, professions, and the state as played out through governmental orders and organizational policies. By placing the dynamics of reorganization in the context of existing policy trajectories, we are able to see both continuities and disruptions. In terms of continuities, the ability to rapidly mobilize the healthcare workforce reflected the historical incursion of policy into the content of healthcare professionals' work. In terms of disruptions, the nascent policy trajectory of patient and caregiver involvement in health care was abruptly halted as redeployment activity centered around assessments of risk, governance, and accountability. Ultimately, this paper draws attention to relationships of expertise, power, and accountability between healthcare professions, governments, health service organizations and the public, offering potential insight into professional work in a post-pandemic world.

RATIONAL, AIMS, AND OBJECTIVES:Qualitative research has been promoted as an important component of the evaluation of complex interventions to support the scale up and spread of health service interventions, but is currently not being maximized in practice. We aim to identify and explore the sociocultural and structural factors that impact the uses (and misuses) of qualitative research in the evaluation of complex health services interventions.METHODS:We conducted a qualitative analysis of data collected in a multiple case study of the evaluation and scale up and spread of three health service intervention.RESULTS:Our findings demonstrate the challenges of meaningfully integrating qualitative research in evaluation programmes lead by clinicians with limited qualitative expertise and operating within an environment dominated by biomedical research, even with methodological support.CONCLUSIONS:Based on these findings we encourage ongoing engagement of qualitative researchers in evaluation programmes to begin to refine our methodological understanding, while also suggesting changes to medical education and evaluation funding models to create fertile environments for interdisciplinary collaborations.

Objective Efforts to scale up evidence-based health care interventions are seen as a key strategy to address complex health system challenges. However, scale-up efforts have shown significant variability. We address the gap between scale-up theory and practice by exploring the socio-cultural factors at play in the evaluation and scale-up of three interventions within the clinical field. Methods A qualitative multiple case study was conducted to characterize the evaluation and scale-up efforts of three interventions. We interviewed 18 participants, including clinicians and researchers across the three cases. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field and capital as a theoretical lens, we conducted a thematic analysis of the data. Results Despite the espoused goals of ensuring that health service interventions are always based on high-quality evidence within the clinical field, this study demonstrates that the outcomes of the evaluations are not the only factor in the decision to engage in scale-up efforts. Important socio-cultural factors also come into play. Bourdieu uses the term capital to refer to the resources that agents compete for and with their acquisition, accumulate power and/or social standing. The type of evidence valued in the clinical field and the ability to leverage capital in demonstrating that value are also important factors. Conclusions Determining if an intervention is effective and should be scaled up is more complex in practice than described in the literature. Efforts are needed to explicitly include the role of social processes in the current frameworks guiding scaling-up efforts.

The medical education (Med Ed) research community characterises itself as drawing on the insights, methods, and knowledge from multiple disciplines and research domains (e.g. Sociology, Anthropology, Education, Humanities, Psychology). This common view of Med Ed research is echoed and reinforced by the narrative used by leading Med Ed departments and research centres to describe their activities as "interdisciplinary." Bibliometrics offers an effective method of investigating scholarly communication to determine what knowledge is valued, recognized, and utilized. By empirically examining whether knowledge production in Med Ed research draws from multiple disciplines and research areas, or whether it primarily draws on the knowledge generated internally within the field of Med Ed, this article explores whether the characterisation of Med Ed research as interdisciplinary is substantiated. A citation analysis of 1412 references from research articles published in 2017 in the top five Med Ed journals was undertaken. A typology of six knowledge clusters was inductively developed. Findings show that the field of Med Ed research draws predominantly from two knowledge clusters: the Applied Health Research cluster (made of clinical and health services research), which represents 41% of the references, and the Med Ed research cluster, which represents 40% of the references. These two clusters cover 81% of all references in our sample, leaving 19% distributed among the other knowledge clusters (i.e., Education, disciplinary, interdisciplinary and topic centered research). The quasi-hegemonic position held by the Applied Health and Med Ed research clusters confines the other sources of knowledge to a peripheral role within the Med Ed research field. Our findings suggest that the assumption that Med Ed research is an interdisciplinary field is not convincingly supported by empirical data and that the knowledge entering Med Ed comes mostly from the health research domain.

Interdisciplinarity has become a buzzword in academia, as research universities funnel their financial resources toward collaborations between faculty in different disciplines. In theory, interdisciplinary collaboration breaks down artificial divisions between different departments, allowing more innovative and sophisticated research to flourish. But does it actually work this way in practice? Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration puts the common beliefs about such research to the test, using empirical data gathered by scholars from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. The book’s contributors critically interrogate the assumptions underlying the fervor for interdisciplinarity. Their attentive scholarship reveals how, for all its potential benefits, interdisciplinary collaboration is neither immune to academia’s status hierarchies, nor a simple antidote to the alleged shortcomings of disciplinary study. Chapter 10 is available Open Access here (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883)

This article critically examines three assumptions underlying recent efforts to advance interdisciplinary research-defined in this article as communication and collaboration between researchers across academic disciplines (e.g. Sociology, Psychology, Biology)-and examines these assumptions' implications for health professions education research (HPER). These assumptions are: (1) disciplines are silos that inhibit the free flowing of knowledge across fields and stifle innovative thinking; (2) interdisciplinary research generates a better understanding of the world as it brings together researchers from various fields of expertise capable of tackling complex problems; and (3) interdisciplinary research reduces fragmentation across groups of researchers by eliminating boundaries. These assumptions are among the new beliefs shaping the contemporary academic arena; they orient academics' and university administrators' decisions toward expanding interdisciplinary research and training, but without solid empirical evidence. This article argues that the field of HPER has largely adopted the premises of interdisciplinary research but has not yet debated the potential effects of organizing around these premises. The authors hope to inspire members of the HPER community to critically examine the ubiquitous discourse promoting interdisciplinarity, and engage in reflection about the future of the field informed by evidence rather than by unsubstantiated assumptions. For example: Should research centres and graduate programs in HPER encourage the development of interdisciplinary or disciplinary-trained researchers? Should training predominantly focus on methods and methodologies or draw more on disciplinary-based knowledge? What is the best route toward increasing the field's profile within academia and attracting the best students and researchers to engage in HPER? These are questions that merit attention at the current juncture as the future of the HPER field relies on decisions made in the present time.

The objective of scientific, or more broadly, academic knowledge is to provide an understanding of the social and natural world that lies beyond common sense and everyday thinking. Academics use an array of techniques, methods and conceptual apparatuses to achieve this goal. The question we explore in this essay is the following: Does the grounded theory approach, in the constructivist version developed by Kathy Charmaz, provide the necessary methodological tools for the creation of knowledge and theories beyond everyday thinking? To conduct our analysis, we have drawn on the rationalist epistemology originally developed by Gaston Bachelard and taken up a few decades later by Pierre Bourdieu and colleagues to look at the epistemological foundation of the CGT methods as defined by Charmaz. We focussed on two distinctive epistemological features characterising constructivist grounded theory (CGT): the use of inductive reasoning to generate interpretative theory; and the primacy of subjectivity over objectivity as the preferred path to knowledge making. While the usefulness of CGT for conducting qualitative research and understanding the perspective of social actors has been acknowledged by scholars in health professions education research and other research areas, the inductivist logic on which it draws raises questions concerning the nature of the knowledge yielded by this approach. As we argue in this article, it is still unclear in what way the interpretative theory generated by CGT is not a duplication of everyday thinking expressed through meta-narratives. It is also unclear how the understanding of social phenomena can be refined if the use of inductive procedures logically implies the creation of a new theory each time a study is conducted. We engage with these questions to broaden the epistemological conversation within the health professions education research community. It is our hope that scholars in the field will engage in this epistemological conversation and advance it in new directions.

The idea of interdisciplinarity has been taken up by academic and governmental organisations around the world and enacted through science policies, funding programs and higher education institutions. In Canada, interdisciplinarity led to a major transformation in health research funding. In 2000, the federal government closed the Medical Research Council (MRC) and created the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). From the outset, CIHR's vision and goals were innovative, as it sought to include the social sciences within its purview alongside more traditional health research sectors. The extent to which it has been successful in this endeavour, however, remains unknown. The aim of our study was to examine how CIHR's intentions to foster inclusiveness and cooperation across disciplines were implemented in the agency's own organisational structure. We focused on social scientists' representation on committees and among decision-makers between 2000 and 2015, one of the key mandates of CIHR being to include the social sciences within its remit and support research in this area. We examined the composition of the Governing Council, the Institute Scientific Directors, the Chairs of the College of Reviewers, and two International Review Panels invited by CIHR. We targeted these committees and decision-makers since they hold the power to influence the field of Canadian health research through the decisions they make. Our findings show that, while CIHR was created with the mandate to support the entire spectrum of health-related research—including the social sciences—this call for inclusiveness has not yet been materialized in the agency's organisational structure. Social scientists, as well as researchers from neighbouring disciplines such as social epidemiology, health promotion and the humanities, are still confined to low levels of representation within CIHR's highest echelons. This imbalance limits social scientists' input into health research in Canada and undermines CIHR's interdisciplinary ambition.

This paper explores social scientists' and humanities (SSH) scholars' integration within the academic medical research environment. Three questions guided our investigation: Do SSH scholars adapt to the medical research environment? How do they navigate their career within a culture that may be inconsistent with their own? What strategies do they use to gain legitimacy? The study builds on three concepts: decoupling, doxa, and epistemic habitus. Twenty-nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with SSH scholars working in 11 faculties of medicine across Canada. Participants were selected through purposeful and snowball sampling. The data were analyzed by thematic content analysis. For most of our participants, moving into medicine has been a challenging experience, as their research practices and views of academic excellence collided with those of medicine. In order to achieve some level of legitimacy more than half of our participants altered their research practices. This resulted in a dissonance between their internalized appreciation of academic excellence and their new, altered, research practices. Only six participants experienced no form of challenge or dissonance after moving into medicine, while three decided to break with their social science and humanities past and make the medical research community their new home. We conclude that the work environment for SSH scholars in faculties of medicine does not deliver on the promise of inclusiveness made by calls for interdisciplinarity in Canadian health research.

In this paper, we present and apply a new framework - the Poles of Production for Producers/Poles of Production for Users (PFP/PFU) model - to empirically study how one particular group of academic scientists has responded to neoliberal changes in science policy and funding in Canada. The data we use are from a qualitative case study of 20 basic health scientists affiliated with a research-intensive university in a large Canadian city. We use the PFP/PFU model to explore the symbolic strategies (the vision of scientific quality) and practical strategies (the acquisition of funding and production of knowledge outputs) scientists adopt to maintain or advance their own position of power in the scientific field. We also compare similarities and differences among scientists trained before and after the rise of neoliberal policy. The PFP/PFU model allows us to see how these individual strategies cumulatively contribute to the construction of dominant and alternate modes of knowledge production. We argue that the alignments and misalignments between quality vision and practice that scientists in this study experienced reflect the symbolic struggles that are occurring among scientists, and between the scientific and political field, over two competing logics and reward systems (PFP/PFU).