Conditions that do or do not disadvantage interdisciplinary research proposals in project evaluation

Despite interdisciplinary research playing a pivotal role in modern science, interdisciplinary research proposals appear to have a lower chance of being funded. Scholars suggested that interdisciplinary research may be disadvantaged in the evaluation and should be earmarked specific resources and evaluated by specific panels. However, empirical evidence is limited regarding the conditions under which interdisciplinary proposals are disadvantaged. We explore this issue in the context of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) research funding framework, which, contrary to the common practice, does not organize the evaluation process around disciplinary panels, but with a panel-free system. The sample includes data from five calls, from March 2015 to September 2017, for a total of 1,928 proposals, and 5,330 evaluations conducted by 3,050 reviewers. We find that the effect of a proposal’s degree of interdisciplinarity is negligible and not significant. We found no variation in this result across scientific fields and disciplinary expertise of reviewers, and no evidence of disciplinary “turf wars.” These results suggest that factors assumed to disadvantage interdisciplinary proposals, such as being inherently more challenging to be evaluated and being riskier, are less problematic when the evaluation is not organized around disciplinary panels but rather with a panel-free system.