Interdisciplinary research is an integrative form of scholarship. Since it was institutionalized in education policy, integration has been hailed as the guiding research method of interdisciplinarity. In recent years, important systematic work has been done to distil general criteria for cross-disciplinary collaboration and coordination from successful cases of local research activity and design. However, emphasis on integration as the method through which interdisciplinary outputs are generated has not yet led to codifying the processes and techniques for integrating knowledge in practice.

This is particularly relevant in the context of research assessment tasks, funding allocation and distribution, and science policy. For example, the final report of the UK’s 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF) concluded that a codified system of quality markers should now be developed to provide more accurate, fairer, and actionable guidance for future quality assessment. At a time when ever more work is recognised and classed as being interdisciplinary, the need for clear and shared evaluative standards is a pressing concern in the academic and policy world.

The failure to establish valid markers can be accounted in ways that make appeal to two distinct, though related, causes. One is lack of a shared theoretical framework that would capture the distinctive attributes of interdisciplinary integration beyond immediate references to the non-reductive, inclusive, contextual, and serendipitous nature of the process. In fact it can be argued that any project aimed at constructing valid indicators is hostage to fortune without a proper methodology of integration. The second cause is a more practical concern about the need to design consistent measures for distinguishing good from bad interdisciplinary research, locally, nationally, and internationally.

In the absence of agreed upon metrics, decisions for allocating interdisciplinary research funding is most likely to be suboptimal. While scientometricians have made strides in attempting to measure interdisciplinarity, the inherently complex nature of interdisciplinary research poses significant challenges. In addition to conceptual issues, criticisms also include the simplistic nature of current measures. Calls have thus been made for better theoretically founded, more sophisticated, and dynamic approaches to more accurately capture the essence of interdisciplinary research.

This is a proposal for a Panel Session to contribute to ITD24 stream #1: “Enhancing the theoretical foundations of inter- and transdisciplinarity”. In response to the Call for proposals, we aim at contributing to the current debate on the “nature, implementation, and evaluation of integration”, based on experience with the “evaluation and assessment” of “multi-case studies”. The purpose is therefore twofold. In the first part, we diagnose, reconstruct, and critique the two causes of the current lack of consistent measures, by presenting joint work that engages philosophical understandings of concepts of integration with the demand for scientometric operationalisations of interdisciplinarity. In the second part of the session, we broaden the scope of the discussion by putting our framework to the test in the context of sharing and discussing direct experience of research evaluations with a relevant stakeholder and the wider public alike.