Boundary Spanning or A New Boundary? Mapping “Hot Issues” in NSF Cross-Cutting Grants

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Abstract

Previous literature on interdisciplinary research has illuminated how unique combination of different disciplines fosters innovation by spanning boundaries. As advantages of interdisciplinarity become widely acknowledged, government policymakers and universities officials have invested on promoting interdisciplinary research. Initiating cross-cutting grants is one of those strategies, however, the effectiveness of targeted funding has been assumed rather than examined, as can be seen in the tendency of studies on this topic tend to focus on general research productivity as funding outcomes rather than on whether funding works as intended. Here I thus analyze full-text abstracts of proposals (n = 50,745) awarded either cross-cutting grants or non-cross-cutting grants by National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2004 to 2011 to empirically assess boundary spanning aspects of cross-cutting grants-funded projects. I aim to answer two questions: (1) Are proposals funded by cross-cutting grants different from projects funded by non-cross-cutting grants in terms of topics and topical contents? (2) Are types of projects funded by cross-cutting grants leaning toward boundary spanning or a new category? Results from structural topic modeling suggest that more than a quarter of proposals awarded cross-cutting grants tend to fall into timely “hot issues” widely regarded as interdisciplinary topics such as Nano Technologies and Urban Sustainability, while most of the other proposals lean toward traditional mono-disciplinary fields. By presenting results, this research discusses how organizational practice for boundary spanning may result in an unintended new boundary. Lastly, I aim to address possible limitations of current NSF cross-cutting funding policy regarding the limited scopes of fundable research in interdisciplinary issues and suggest a better direction for future policy-making on fostering interdisciplinarity.

Author

• Jina Lee, University of Arizona