There is a word that funding agencies, university strategy documents, and conference keynotes have been reaching for with remarkable consistency over the last two decades or so: interdisciplinarity. Sometimes it arrives dressed as cross-disciplinarity, or multi-disciplinarity, or convergence research, but the underlying aspiration is the same — that science should break out of its silos, that the most important problems do not respect the boundaries we have drawn between fields, and that researchers who work across those boundaries will produce something richer than those who stay within them. Everyone agrees with this in principle. In practice, the structures we have built seem almost designed to make it difficult.
Funding applications that require deep disciplinary expertise and broad cross-field impact, compressed into a few hundred words. Journals whose review processes are poorly equipped to evaluate work that sits between established areas. Reviewers who treat interdisciplinary submissions as insufficiently rigorous, when the real issue is often that the submission format was never designed for them in the first place. The aspiration is genuine. The infrastructure is not yet there to match it.
But I do not want to spend this post cataloguing institutional failures, tempting as that is. The more interesting observation is this: interdisciplinarity, for all the infrastructure that has been built around it, has never really been an institutional achievement. It is a personal one. It happens when an individual researcher decides to invite someone unexpected into their work — someone from outside their immediate circle, outside their field, outside their usual network. Grand strategies do not break silos. People do, one collaboration at a time. And that is entirely within our control, regardless of what the structures around us reward or penalise.
Hence the title. Bring a stranger to your research.
Let me start with the obvious benefit, because it is obvious for good reason. When you invite someone into your work who has no prior exposure to your field, they will look at your problems differently. They will ask questions that no one in your group has thought to ask. They carry different assumptions, a different intellectual history, a different instinct for what matters — and that difference is precisely the point. Some of those questions will miss the mark entirely — that is fine, and expected. But some will open doors you did not know were there. I have seen this happen enough times to stop being surprised by it, but it still delights me. A single unexpected question from someone who does not know what they are "supposed" to think can redirect a research agenda entirely.
Second, you break silos — and in doing so, you extend the reach of your work in ways that accumulate over time. For much of my career, I published primarily within a single community. My work was seen by the people who attended those conferences and read those journals, and largely invisible to everyone else. Moving beyond that, and beginning to publish in venues outside my original field, changed things considerably — not just in terms of where the work appeared, but in terms of what it connected to, what it influenced, and what influenced it back. Citation counts, for whatever they are worth, followed. But more importantly, so did ideas. You cannot benefit from work you do not know exists, and you cannot build on a conversation you were never part of. Bringing people from other fields into your research is one of the most reliable ways to enter those conversations.
Third — and this is the one I feel most strongly about — if the stranger you bring in is a young researcher, you are doing something that I think we have a genuine obligation to do. We talk about building the next generation of scientists, but the mechanisms by which we actually do that are often narrow and informal. How many times have we involved an undergraduate student, or someone from a tangential project, in a piece of work and then offered them only an acknowledgement? I suspect many of us have. The line between an acknowledgement and a co-authorship can be unclear — I will admit it is not always obvious to me where it falls — but I would argue that we tend to err consistently in the wrong direction. A contribution that earns a mention in the acknowledgements section may well deserve a place in the author list. The difference to the established researcher is small. The difference to the early-career person is not.
Fourth — and I say this without apology — think about it selfishly if that is what it takes. I am not asking for altruism. The people you bring into your work, the students you support, the collaborators you invite in from unexpected places: you cannot know which of them will one day return the favour, open a door, or advance an idea you planted. If the ethical argument does not move you, the practical one should. Bringing more people into science is good for them, good for you, and good for the work. Those three things are not in tension.
Now for the drawback, because there is one and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Writing with more people is harder. Managing a collaboration across disciplines, career stages, and sometimes time zones is a genuine overhead — in communication, in coordination, in the slower pace at which decisions get made and drafts get resolved. Some of the most productive solo or small-team researchers I know have made a clear-eyed calculation that the cost is too high. I respect that calculation even when I disagree with it. What I would say is this: the overhead is real, but it is also a skill. The more you practise building and managing diverse collaborations, the less costly they become. And the output, when it works, is rarely something you could have produced alone.
I am not far from retirement. I say that with something closer to anticipation than weariness — the hope that there will come a point when I can step back and watch people do better than I managed, with foundations I helped to build. I came from circumstances that were not straightforward, and I have been fortunate in ways I try not to take for granted. But I am acutely aware that others face steeper climbs, with less support, and that the academic community does not always do what it could to change that.
I was reminded of this recently at a prominent gathering in the social sciences — the kind of event that carries real prestige, where the work being presented is genuinely excellent. I was there with a collaborator, a young woman who had worked in my group, and we were looking at a poster that presented compelling data on the under-representation of researchers from certain parts of the world in high-profile science. The work was careful and the findings were striking. My collaborator turned to the presenter and asked, with complete composure: "You are from a top-twenty university in the world. How many researchers have you hired or recruited from the disadvantaged communities your work describes?"
It is a fair question. It is, I would argue, the necessary question. Presenting data about inequality and then declining to interrogate your own role in it is a particular kind of intellectual comfort. The results we produce about the world are also results about us. They describe what we do and what we fail to do. If the findings are damning, the response cannot only be a paper.
The presenter answered. The answer was none. Not a small number, not a work in progress, not an honest admission of a structural barrier they were trying to navigate. None. But it was the explanation that followed which was genuinely difficult to absorb: that researchers from those disadvantaged communities were often not sufficiently prepared academically to meet the standards required.
I will let that sit for a moment.
The entire point — the reason we reach down, invite in, collaborate, supervise, mentor, and include — is precisely because preparation is something we build together. Nobody arrives fully formed. The researchers sitting at the top of this field did not emerge that way either; someone invested in them, created conditions for them, gave them time and patience and the benefit of the doubt. To present data documenting who gets left behind, and then to cite their under-preparation as the justification for leaving them behind, is to mistake the consequence of exclusion for its cause.
So here is what I am asking. Something small, and entirely within your control. For your next piece of work, bring someone in who would not otherwise have been there. A researcher from a different field. A student who is not yet established. Someone whose name would not automatically appear on the author list. Make the effort to include them properly, with authorship they have earned. You will not always get a transformative result. But you will get something, and so will they, and the field will be slightly less insular than it was before.
That is worth the overhead.