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The importance of interdisciplinary research (IDR) is now well-known, and facilitating the
development of effective IDR teams is recognized as an important goal by many institutions and
funding agencies. The Toolbox project, developed by University of Idaho researchers, aims to
enhance cross-disciplinary communication among scientific collaborators through philosophical
dialogue about research assumptions. The Toolbox project has been implemented with more than 30
research teams, and we wish to identify active areas of interdisciplinary research for extension
of the Toolbox approach. We address this topic using two sources of data: i) citation information
from a random sample of 1000 publications, and ii) disciplinary affiliation information on 28
research teams that have participated in the Toolbox project. The analyses involve compositional
data, so we will review some of the challenges with this type of data, which lead to the use of
log-ratio transformed proportions. Multivariate methods are then used to illustrate active research
areas, which are compared with the affiliation of teams that have participated in the Toolbox project,
to suggest candidate research areas for extension of the project. Several types of sensitivity analyses
are used to assess the robustness of the conclusions.
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