A Deliberation on Interdisciplinary Research in Higher Education

Different developments in recent years have provided protection for participative and interdisciplinary research from research and educational institutes and other organizations which invest in research. Because of the need for having a comprehensive look in solving problems and understanding complexities and also multidimensionality of problems which societies encounter some special ideas have evolved. Based on these ideas if researchers who are involved in one discipline, without being helped from experts of other disciplines, may come to ineffective solutions without sufficient consideration in all aspects of the problems. So research policy makers have come to these conclusions that: first, researches relating to social problems should be conducted with helps of researchers from other scientific fields. Second, researchers should work cooperatively and having interaction with each other. Third, their research finding should be so integrated that as much as possible a comprehensive and agreeable solution could be advanced. And finally, all above said will be achieved through interdisciplinary research. In this paper, based on validated scientific texts, authors have tried to provide a comprehensive look at the nature of interdisciplinary research in higher education. The basic subjects offered are: development of the ways of conducting academic research, moving of academic research to interdisciplinarity, consideration of academic disciplines for understanding interdisciplinary research, considering the nature of interdisciplinary research, early and late interdisciplinarity, and the motives of reflection of interdisciplinarity in policy making.