Cross research council responsive mode pilot scheme evaluation final report

This report on the evaluation of UKRI’s Cross Research Council Responsive Mode (CRCRM) Pilot Scheme 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.

The 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.

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.

The full report and accompanying documents are available via UKRI.