Flanders Research Information Space as a tool to monitor interdisciplinary research in Flanders

Abstract

In this study we use the data of an interorganisational CRIS to identify interdisciplinary research projects in Flanders. Because of the amount and the richness of the data available on the FRIS portal, we were able to combine two approaches to approximate interdisciplinarity, i.e. an organisational approach, based on the degree of diversity of the team of researchers involved in a project, and a cognitive approach, based on the diversity of topics used in the content of the project. With these two approaches we were able to identify a set of research projects that are potentially interdisciplinary in nature. With the proposed mechanism, we can monitor how interdisciplinary research is situated in Flanders and how it evolves over time. Additionally, it can be further developed into a visualisation tool for the FRIS portal to visually mark those projects that are identified as IDR. Despite the fact that this study only focused on the FRIS portal, the proposed methods can easily be applied to other (inter)institutional CRIS systems.