UKRI publishes evaluation of the Cross Research Council Responsive Mode (CRCRM) Pilot Scheme

The evaluation of UKRI’s Cross Research Council Responsive Mode (CRCRM) Pilot Scheme has now been published.  The report was prepared by Technopolis, the Innovation & Research Caucus and UKRI. The IRC’s contribution to the evaluation focused on understanding the nature of interdisciplinarity within applications submitted to the scheme and the challenges associated with assessing interdisciplinary research.

Prof Jen Nelles, a member of IRC’s research team on this project, commented,

“This approach emphasises that interdisciplinarity is more than just the coming together of different disciplines in collaborative projects and that assessment should focus on how those disciplines integrate and the contributions the research has for each participating discipline. Assessing proposals should involve exploring how ideas and teams will be integrated, planned co-creation practices, discussions of the challenges of interdisciplinarity and how these can be overcome, and evidence of reciprocal benefits.”

Jen further added, “A key output from the IRC’s work was the development of SIFT (Signals of Interdisciplinary Focus in Text). SIFT is a novel scientometric linguistic measure of interdisciplinarity that is capable of analysing text. It is based on a purposefully curated training dataset focusing on how proposals articulate the interdisciplinary dimensions of their proposal and that specifically targets and assesses language about the integration of ideas, integration of teams, interdisciplinary ways of working, reciprocal benefits, and interdisciplinary challenges.  SIFT is independent of generative AI and so does not pose a data protection risk. Furthermore, since it is not reliant on generative AI, it overcomes challenges of the ‘black box’ and lack of explainability”.

The evaluation notes that SIFT offers a promising approach for systematically identifying and analysing interdisciplinary characteristics within applications and awards, contributing to broader discussions about how interdisciplinary research can be understood and assessed.

Recommendations from this report have been considered by a dedicated Task and Finish group for embedding into UKRI practices. Additionally, UKRI may consider the potential of the SIFT tool being used in the future to analyse its portfolio and to distinguish between interdisciplinary research (IDR)  and multidisciplinary research (MDR).