Multidisciplinary
Different disciplines contribute alongside one another to a shared question.
Field breadth is visible in TRACE. A paper’s research approach needs content evidence.TRUST TRACE · Trust Research Analytics and Citation Explorer
TRUST TRACE
Tracing trust across disciplines.
Public trust surveys measure how people trust. TRUST TRACE maps how trust research connects — across disciplines, countries and institutions — and is developing indicators such as a cross-field connection score.
These indicators describe research activity, not public trust or research quality. Preview: relevance screening is pending. Name proposed to the Board, 13 Nov 2026, subject to trademark clearance.
Move across disciplines, through time and around the world. The same research cohort and publication period apply to each core view and its record list.
Explore the recalculated field networks → Shared-paper fields and citation connections, with the same All/AI and year selection.
Follow a connection between fields
Records behind this view
Field and country selections narrow this list. Citation and sector selections show their example evidence above; this list retains the selected cohort and period.
Show the counts and denominators
These counts are historical descriptions, not ratings of research quality or AI trustworthiness. The provisional AI title rule may miss relevant research.
Interpretation before classification
What makes research multi-, inter- or transdisciplinary?
These are working descriptions of how research is done. Bibliographic maps can guide questions and screening; they cannot establish a study’s approach on their own.
Three ways of working
Alongside. Integrated. Co-created.
Working definitions used here. These describe research approaches, not a ranking or three groups already classified in TRACE.
Interdisciplinary
Researchers integrate concepts, methods or explanations across disciplines.
Citation connections are visible. Integration cannot be inferred from a citation alone.Transdisciplinary
Researchers and societal partners combine knowledge to address a shared problem.
Affiliated coauthors are visible. Joint knowledge production needs process evidence.Conceptual illustrations, not measured networks. Definitions vary across research traditions. This working distinction follows TU Delft’s research-methods teaching and OECD’s account of scientific and societal knowledge. Definitions and evidence limits →
Separate historical archive
The earlier archive covers 25,408 recovered records from 1990 through partial 2024. Its controls are separate from the 2019-2023 core views above.
Open the historical archive and field co-assignment networkCo-assignment links share field labels on papers. Citation links connect citing and cited papers. Their weights cannot be combined.
The transdisciplinary ambition
Look for the process behind the partnership.
To identify knowledge co-production, we need evidence about the roles of scientific and societal participants. Institution types and citation links do not answer these questions.
Define the problem together
Who shaped the question and priorities?
Not assessable in the abstract pilotIntegrate knowledge
How were disciplinary and societal contributions combined?
Not assessable in the abstract pilotEvaluate together
Who judged the findings and their practical relevance?
Not assessable in the abstract pilotThe existing purposive 30-paper pilot cannot adequately assess any of these phases from the available abstract evidence. This is missing evidence, not zero activity. A reviewed codebook and independent human assessment are needed before classifying studies.
The Foundation’s TRUST framework adds Trustworthiness, Risk, User, Sphere and Terrain as content lenses. These can describe the question a paper addresses, alongside its research approach.
How to read these maps
- Field breadth: one cached primary-topic field per selected paper. All field counts sum to the selected collection; this does not describe every contributing discipline.
- Citations: selected 2019–2023 sources cite eligible TRACE targets from 1990–2023. Each source–target pair counts once. Within-field links are excluded from the network, but remain in the denominator of the earlier citation indicator.
- The default map shows the eight fields with the most incident cross-field links in the selected cohort and period, and links among them. Its displayed-link coverage is reported. All-fields mode or List reveals the wider network. Positions are a layout choice, not a distance measure.
- Cross-sector coauthorship requires an education affiliation, a known distinct author ID and usable institution type for every listed author, plus two different authors spanning education and company, government or nonprofit. Types can include research institutes; they do not identify societal contributions. Link counts overlap within papers.
- The AI cohort is a provisional title screen. Technical trust and other irrelevant meanings remain in the broader historical collection pending scope screening. No graph establishes a representative census, a quality ranking or a causal effect.
Sources and working definitions
TU Delft, Multidisciplinary Research Methods for Engineers: distinguishes parallel disciplinary contributions, integration across disciplines, and integration with stakeholders outside academia.
https://ocw.tudelft.nl/course-readings/1-1-5-main-takeaways-multidisciplinary-research/
OECD (2020), Addressing societal challenges using transdisciplinary research: scientific knowledge combined with stakeholder and citizen knowledge.
https://doi.org/10.1787/0ca0ca45-en
These definitions are an explicit working choice; other research traditions use the terms differently. No three-way classification of the cached papers has been established.
Time counts papers by publication year within the selected period, not current growth. Country bars count selected papers with any recorded author-affiliation country; a paper can contribute to several countries. Missing country codes are reported separately. They describe institutional locations, not participants, nationality or national trust. Only cached metadata is used here. External sources are shown as text, not links.