An Interdisciplinary Literature Survey

Repko (2008) makes several important points regarding interdisciplinary literature searches. He notes that the task is harder than disciplinary literature searches for several reasons. First, there is simply more ground to be covered. Second, library catalogues are organized along disciplinary lines, and different terminology is used in different disciplines. Interdisciplinarians must thus master the terminology used in each discipline of interest. Note that interdisciplinarians may fail to appreciate that a particular discipline is relevant to a particular problem if they search works in that discipline using the terminology of another. To be sure, books may be classified with respect to multiple subjects, and some of these subjects span disciplines, but this only partially alleviates the problem. Third, and less obviously, while disciplinary specialists will readily understand and place in context most works in their discipline (or at least subdiscipline), the interdisciplinarian must place the insights of a particular discipline within the context of its disciplinary perspective, and this will mean reading not only about insights relevant to a particular question but more generally regarding the discipline’s theories, methods, and subject matter, among other disciplinary elements. It also means that careful attention must be paid to the disciplinary identity of authors.