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2 years ago in Scholarly Contribution By Abhay R
In interdisciplinary projects, how do you define a unified "contribution" when your co-authors come from fields with completely different evaluation standards?
My team includes a sociologist, a computer scientist, and a public health expert. We're publishing a paper together, but we can't agree on what the main "contribution" is—is it the novel algorithm, the social theory, or the applied intervention? How do we synthesize this for a coherent narrative?
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By Lukas Answered 3 weeks ago
This is the central challenge of interdisciplinary work. I've found success by moving away from a single "main" contribution and instead defining a composite contribution. Map it visually: your contribution is the unique intersection where the sociological theory informs the design of the algorithm, which in turn enables a new public health intervention that couldn't exist otherwise. The narrative isn't "we did X and Y," but "by bridging X and Y, we enabled Z." Frame the paper to show how each discipline's input is necessary but insufficient alone. The unified contribution is the bridging logic itself—the novel framework or process you created to make the collaboration work and produce a result none of you could have achieved singly.
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