Explicit Knowledge Structures as a Tool for Overcoming Obstacles to Interdisciplinary Research.

The article discusses the significance of explicit knowledge structures as a device for addressing obstacles to interdisciplinary research. Benda and colleagues suggest that all collaborators begin by explicitly stating their particular discipline's knowledge structure to deal with the obstacles that confound interdisciplinary research. They define knowledge structure in five categories: disciplinary history and forms of scientific knowledge, spatial and temporal scales of that knowledge, precision, accuracy of predictions, and availability of data to construct, calibrate, and test predictive models. A benefit of the explicit statements of knowledge structures by the team members is the production of a formal paper trail of assumptions, data types, scales and precision of measured variables, and compromises that have been made in recognition of mismatches among disciplines.