Team Research glossary

A new interdisciplinary field that empirically provides a better understanding of how teams connect and collaborate to achieve scientific breakthroughs that would not be attainable by individual efforts.

As described in the Collaboration and team science: field guide, many factors, such as self-awareness, emotional intelligence, trust, shared vision, communication, effective leadership, mentoring and conflict management have been identified as necessary to build successful partnerships among team members (2). For more information, please visit the Wikipedia ‘Science of team science’ webpage.

The fact of involving two or more different subjects or areas of knowledge. These can include the following ways of working:

• Multidisciplinary
• Interdisciplinary
• Transdisciplinary

Multidisciplinary working is where disciplines work alongside each other and coordinate around objects or themes of interest (classic example is multidisciplinary medical teams who do not need to know each other’s approaches to a patient and thus physiotherapy, medicine, nursing and pathology/histology) can all work alongside one another. (3)

Defining characteristics: juxtaposing, sequencing, coordinating

Interdisciplinary working is where disciplines integrate combining methods or theories to produce new ways of doing things. For example, synthetic biology involves biologists, chemists, engineers, computer scientists, and others, to approach biological entities with particular goals of modularisation, abstraction and decoupling design and manufacture of new organisms. (3)

Defining characteristics: integrating, interacting, linking, focusing, blending

Transdisciplinary working means to transcend disciplinary boundaries often by incorporating knowledge from beyond the academe (and this is a European way to clearly distinguish trans- from inter-). (3)

Defining characteristics: transcending, transgressing, transforming

A taxonomy of Interdisciplinarity: (3)

Generally associated with health science research. ‘Translational research is the process by which basic scientific research is translated into patient-focused research that improves healthcare and wellbeing within society’. (4) 

The means by which team members marshal and coordinate their individual resources – cognitive, affective, and behavioural – to meet task demands necessary for collective goal accomplishment. (5)

(Adjective) dealing with or treating the whole of something or someone and not just a part. (6)

Knotworking is introduced as a new idea and an emerging practice for enhancing collaboration across organisational and team boundaries. Knotworking refers to co-located ‘knots’ that are organised on a temporary basis to solve a specific task, a problem or an open question requiring multi-disciplinary expertise in a project. (7)

Teamwork combines the individual efforts of all team members to achieve a goal. Teamwork is usually overseen by a team leader, and those within a team are delegated individual tasks to complete to contribute towards the team’s end goal. (8)

Collaboration is, by definition, something you cannot do on your own. The word ‘collaboration’ is derived from the Latin word ‘collaborare’- literally ‘to work together’. (9)

Co-opetition is a particular form of collaboration between competing organisations or businesses [16]. Literally a mix of co-operation and competition, this form of collaboration is a type of strategic alliance that changes the rules of competition to move from a zero-sum game to a plus-sum game. (10)

A list of concepts and categories in a subject area that shows the relationships between them. (11)

A branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of existence. (11)