The Limited Role of Social Sciences and Humanities in Interdisciplinary Funding: What are Its Effects?

ABSTRACT There is wide agreement among scholars in research policy that the position of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in interdisciplinary research is not as good as it should be. Academics give many reasons why SSH fields should become more active collaborators in interdisciplinarity, including the capacity within these disciplines to introduce new research questions and to make interdisciplinary research more ethically and societally grounded. This article assesses the conditions attached to 127 recent funding programmes for interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary research. The findings indicate that the exclusion of SSH from interdisciplinary fields is an ongoing problem in research funding. Furthermore, when given funding, SSH disciplines are less likely to be given the opportunity to connect their research questions and targets solely to the advancement of knowledge. These priorities increase the likelihood of SSH disciplines contributing to multidisciplinary research rather than focusing on interdisciplinarity with knowledge integration.


Introduction
There is substantial transformative potential in interdisciplinary research.Both interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary studies have the potential to enhance understanding of the world around, and to foster the development of new tools and ideas aimed at resolving societal and practical problems.The capacity of interdisciplinary research to find solutions to societally urgent problems is often used to justify it (Flink and Kaldewey 2018;König and Gorman 2017).However, there are also epistemic reasons to pursue interdisciplinarity and crossdisciplinarity: the crossing of academic boundaries may lead to scientific advancement, shedding light on the complexity of the wider world and the relationships between the natural and the social world (Boon and Van Baalen 2018;Klein 2017;MacLeod and Nagatsu 2018).The focus in this article is on how funders of interdisciplinary research define the research targets.In particular, I consider the funding opportunities for social sciences and humanities (SSH): it has long been recognised that these disciplines are not as well represented in interdisciplinary research as the natural and technical sciences (Felt 2015).
This article assesses the conditions attached to 127 recent funding programmes for interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary research.The findings reported here show that research funding allocated to SSH fields often prioritise the need for practical goals and a transdisciplinary approach.They also show that there are fewer opportunities for SSH to conduct epistemically-oriented research in interdisciplinary research settings.
CONTACT Anita Välikangas anita.valikangas@helsinki.fi Doctoral Researcher, University of Helsinki, PL 24 (Unioninkatu 40), Helsinki, 00014 Finland discussion, the general term that encompasses all forms of disciplinary interaction is crossdisciplinarity: this incorporates interdisciplinarity (research with knowledge integration), multidisciplinarity (without integration) and transdisciplinarity (the involvement of non-academic actors in knowledge creation) (Klein 2017).In the light of these varieties within crossdisciplinary research, I use the term 'interdisciplinarity with/without knowledge integration' when I am not using interdisciplinarity as an umbrella concept, but rather connecting it to the topic of knowledge integration.
The article proceeds as follows.In the next section I consider arguments promoting the inclusion of SSH fields in interdisciplinary research, then I introduce the analytical categories used to distinguish the different types of goals in research funding.The following sections describe the materials and the methods, and outline the main findings.The findings and their implications for interdisciplinary research are assessed in the concluding section.

SSH and Interdisciplinary Research
Social sciences and humanities (SSH) include various disciplines with divergent purposes, ranging from practice-oriented areas of law and education to more inward-looking subjects such as history and anthropology (see Becher and Trowler 2001).
There are some common characteristics that differentiate SSH from the natural and technical sciences, such as the heavy emphasis in SSH on reflexivity and novelty (Reale et al. 2018).Central targets in SSH are usually the provision of critical understanding, new frames of reference and interpretative explanations (Klein 2005).These targets are not always in accordance with the primary interests of STEM researchers.There are significant differences between SSH fields, and it is likely that these differences will affect the capacity of different areas to collaborate with STEM fields (Pedersen 2016;Reale et al. 2018).
Recent developments in several SSH fields, including economics, political science and sociology, have led to the strengthening of the role of quantitative approaches, coming at the expense of qualitative or theoretical contributions (Skarbek 2020;Zampieri and Bortolini 2021).In interdisciplinary research, it is usually easier to utilise quantitative rather than qualitative data and methodology, especially since this approach is more easily compatible with the typical code of conduct of STEM (MacLeod and Nagatsu 2018;Nagatsu et al. 2020).It is possible that research interdisciplinary funding for SSH and STEM supports best those fields of SSH which use a quantitative methodology. 3 Typical research targets in SSH are not connected to the production of commercial innovations, or pragmatic outputs (Jacob and Jabrane 2018;Solovey 2020).Consequently, SSH disciplines may find it more difficult to attract external funding.This can weaken their position in universities if management prioritises disciplines according to how much money they generate via contract research (Leišyté 2007).
In terms of interdisciplinarity, another major difference between SSH and STEM is the role of collaboration.The natural and technical sciences have a long history of research collaboration, both disciplinary and interdisciplinary, and it is not uncommon for publications to have tens of authors.On the other hand, ideal research in the humanities and the social sciences has involved individual scholars pursuing their interests in the ways they consider optimal (Becher and Trowler 2001).However, it has become increasingly common in the last couple of decades for scholars in SSH fields to engage more in research collaboration and co-authorship (Henriksen 2016).There have been several interdisciplinary research actions within humanities and SSH, ranging from art history to sustainability sciences and digital humanities (Klein and Frodeman 2017;Nagatsu et al. 2020).
Many scholars in research policy and the philosophy of science have written about the inclusion of SSH fields in interdisciplinary collaboration, suggesting the need for more cooperation in interdisciplinary research (Felt 2015;Felt et al. 2016;Frodeman 2014Frodeman , 2016;;Stamm 2019;Tuana 2013Tuana , 2018)).One of the key reasons for advocating the inclusion of SSH is the assumption that there is more potential in these fields to enhance understanding of the relationship between academic research and society.Tuana (2013Tuana ( , 2018) ) supports the inclusion of philosophy and ethics, thereby introducing 'coupled ethical-epistemological research' that addresses ethical and epistemic implications.Examples of topics that would benefit from such analysis include the creation of new scientific models and questions concerning methodological decisions (Tuana 2013(Tuana , 2018)).Felt similarly argues that SSH fields are well equipped to enhance understanding of innovations and technoscientific development in the European Union, being better placed to share knowledge about differences in and potential sources of resistance and restriction (Felt 2015).Tuana (2013) justifies the inclusion of SSH fields in interdisciplinarity on both practical and epistemic grounds.In addition to shedding light on issues such the ethical impact of methodological decisions, they may also help to improve the science.For example, grounded consideration of ethical values could facilitate the creation of new scientific hypotheses and influence the kind of questions disciplines are asked to address (Tuana 2013).This stance resonates with Frodeman and Briggle's (2016) argument that more interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophers and researchers in other areas would be beneficial to science.However, it would need to involve communication such that philosophers help researchers to understand what could be asked of them, and learn more about the interests and needs of other research communities.
One major goal in the inclusion of SSH in interdisciplinarity is to ensure the provision of equal opportunities to all partners.Studies in transdisciplinary research often suggest that all participants in interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary research should contribute to the definition of research goals and expected outcomes, as it can be otherwise difficult to establish a lasting collaboration between actors (Felt 2015;Schikowitz 2020).Stamm (2019) investigates instances of integrating SSH in the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme.Analysing two reports from 2015 and 2018 she concludes that the European Commission's aspiration to include SSH in interdisciplinary research has not been very successful.One visible sign of this failure was the overall lack of SSH partners in funded Horizon 2020 projects, and another was the limited amount of funding given to SSH partners in funded projects (Stamm 2019;Stamm, Møller, and Hetel 2015). 4 Stamm (2019) argues that these problems could, to some extent, be attributed to the failure to recognise the special needs of interdisciplinary research and research management, and the tendency in the research policy of the European Commission to define research problems in a top-down manner.As a consequence, SSH are threatened with being put in a suboptimal position in interdisciplinary research, given supporting roles or targets to work towards as reflective add-ons or to subdue public controversy, incapable of setting their own research questions or agendas (Stamm 2019;Viseu 2015).Moreover, there is an increased likelihood that crossdisciplinary projects with SSH disciplines will turn into multidisciplinary endeavours instead of aiming at the genuine integration of methods, knowledge and concepts (Felt et al. 2016;Mennes 2020;Stamm 2019).

Diverse Goals in Interdisciplinary Research
The aim of this study is to uncover different formulations of interdisciplinarity in research funding.I draw on two frameworks of interdisciplinary funding to shed light on the different targets of interdisciplinarity and funding programmes.The first is the typology Huutoniemi, Klein, Bruun and Hukkinen (2010) used to distinguish between research targets, and the second is the distinction by funding programmes into 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' funding (Mäki 2016;Stamm 2019).Huutoniemi et al. (2010) analyse the various formulations of interdisciplinarity in proposals funded by the four research councils by the Academy of Finland.They broadly categorise research goals in such proposals as epistemological, instrumental and mixed.Epistemologically-oriented research aims at expanding current knowledge about the research object and enhancing understanding or explanation (Huutoniemi et al. 2010, 85).Instrumentally-oriented interdisciplinarity, on the other hand, has extra-academic goals such as resolving or alleviating social problems, or developing commercial products (Huutoniemi et al. 2010, 85).Research in the mixed-orientation category places equal emphasis on improving knowledge and finding solutions to extra-scientific problems (Huutoniemi et al. 2010, 85).The authors point out that a short note about potential practical applications is not sufficient to make research mixed in its orientation, and that both epistemological and practical objectives should be identified in research plans.
To shed light on the differences between research-led and theme-led funding it is also worth identifying some differences in how funding agencies define research goals.Assessing the research policy of the European Union, Stamm (2019) distinguishes between top-down and bottom-up approaches to interdisciplinarity in research funding (Gleed and Marchant 2016; see also Mäki 2016).These two approaches differ in how they relate to the research questions.The questions and topics in bottom-up interdisciplinarity arise primarily from the scientific community, whereas the top-down approach is more strategic, with pre-set goals or targets (Stamm 2019).According to Stamm, top-down approaches to interdisciplinarity often fail to reach the integration stage (of ideas, concepts or methodologies) and result in multidisciplinary research with which team members aim to contribute to their own disciplines.Currently, the European Commission prioritises the top-down approach in its funding of interdisciplinarity (Stamm 2019).The findings of the current study show that Stamm's (2019) observation about the scarcity of bottom-up funding extends beyond the programmes launched by the European Commission.

Data Collection and Data Set
This study examines the funding opportunities to support interdisciplinarity (and other forms of crossdisciplinary research) in Europe and North America, including governmental funders and voluntary organisations.The data was collected in two rounds, the first between November 2018 and February 2019, and the second January-February 2022.The goal is to cover a variety of projectbased funding opportunities, from both public and private sources.
Final data comprises of 127 funding programmes for interdisciplinary research.The data-gathering proceeded as follows.In 2019 I collected the first sample of funding programmes (n = 40), starting from the research funders listed in a report on interdisciplinary funding (Gleed and Marchant 2016).I supplemented the sample with material from general web searches 5 and the opportunities announced by significant research funders including the European Union and the National Science Foundation.The selected funding programmes offered 10,000 euros or more, and awards and prizes related to previous research were excluded from the analysis.This first round of data collection yielded a total of 40 funding programmes.
The second, more comprehensive round of data collection and analysis took place in the beginning of 2022.This time, I collected information on funding opportunities listed in the Research Professional commercial database, 6 which covers several countries, and includes STEM and SSH fields.I used the keywords interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity to locate all potentially relevant funding opportunities.This second round yielded 86 new funding opportunities.The final data set comprises the funding programmes collected during the two data-collection rounds.I collected the guidelines for applicants from each of the funding programmes selected: these were usually in PDF format and had to be available in English).Table 1 describes the countries in which the funding programmes were, and whether they were funded by public or private funders or by universities.
Funding programmes differ considerably in size.The most prolific continuous funders of interdisciplinary research in this data set were the Horizon Europe (and Horizon 2020) framework programme of the European Commission and the 'Ten big ideas for the future' project of the National Science Foundation (US).Given the focus in this analysis on the diversity of research funding, I have not included all funding programmes launched by the NSF and Horizon Europe as separate entities.However, I recognise the impact of these funding institutions in the analysis.

Data Analysis
After collecting the relevant funding guidelines, I assessed them as follows.In the first round of inquiry, conducted in 2018, I read through the guidelines and made notes on the similarities and differences among the funders.I was interested in the definition of research goals, hence I collected information about the targets of research (epistemic, practical, mixed) and the specificity with which funders identify ideal research targets (researcher-led topics or strategic themes).When analysing differences between diverse formulations of interdisciplinarity, I also drew from the differentiation used by Klein (2017) about narrow and broad interdisciplinarity.This distinction highlights that there are differences in scope for interdisciplinary projects.These differences relate to the number of disciplines engaged, and the compatibility of their epistemological methodologies and paradigms.I covered all types of interdisciplinary funding programmes, not only those that explicitly mentioned SSH.Key differences and similarities between the programmes started to emerge at the early stage of analysis.The analysis yielded five separate categories of interdisciplinary findings, situated in the axis of researcher-led/epistemological and strategic/pragmatic.Most programmes that were researcher-led were epistemically oriented, whereas strategic funding tended to cover programmes with a mixed orientation.In epistemically-oriented programmes, a major difference came from whether the programmes funded both monodisciplinary and interdisciplinary research (category A) or only interdisciplinarity (category B).In programmes with mixed orientation, the most significant difference was in outputs, concerning whether it sufficed for groups to deliver academic contributions (category C) or to have societal impact as well (category D).R&D oriented funding opportunities (category E) also formed a distinct category, as for them, a portion of the funding needed to come from external sources.
Next, I systematically collected information on the following characteristics in all the programmes: 1) the definition of interdisciplinarity (how important it is for the groups to achieve knowledge integration); 2) expected research outputs (disciplinary collaboration, academic publications, extra-academic goals, or something else); 3) the inclusion/exclusion of SSH disciplines, 4) the amount of extra-academic collaboration (if the projects had to have non-academic members); and 5) length and the amount of funding.This type of information was available for all the funding programmes I studied.

Results
The analysis revealed five main categories of interdisciplinary research: Table 1 offers a summary of their characteristics.
A large proportion of the programmes studied belonged to challenge-led categories C (25%) and D (30%), whereas the numbers in categories A (18%), B (17%) and E (8%) were much more modest.Graph 1 shows their distribution.Graph 2 outlines what types of funders supported research in these different categories.
We should not make too general conclusions about the availability of different types of research funding from this data set.As said, the data set provides more examples rather than a comprehensive picture about all available funding opportunities. 7Table 2 shows the countries from which the funding programmes were from, as well as about whether they were run by public or non-profit funding, or by universities.
In the next step of analysis, I looked in more depth at the role of SSH in the funding programmes studied.Category A includes funding instruments supporting both STEM and

Category A) Researcher-Led Funding Programmes for Both Monodisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Research
The first category covers programmes with no disciplinary or thematic constraints, funding both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research.Funders may be selective in the disciplinary areas they aim to support, whereas academics are able to define the final research questions.One of the biggest sources of funds in this category is the Starting Grants programme run by the European Research Commission (ERC): it 'encourages proposals of a multi-or interdisciplinary nature which cross the boundaries between different fields of research'.This category also includes several national research funders stating their intention to give equal opportunities to disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholars.This category includes various research fellowships and grants offered to individual researchers rather than research teams.The aspect of interdisciplinarity is also visible in the interdisciplinary work environment (e.g. the European Institute for Marine Studies) or in the interdisciplinary nature of the topic addressed (e.g.psychiatric research or studies on diabetes).These conditions correspond with what Huutoniemi et al. (2010) refer to as contextualising multidisciplinarity, where knowledge is produced in a multidisciplinary context, but the cognitive interaction between the fields is quite limited and mainly occurs in the problem-setting phase.This limited interdisciplinarity is connected to the fact that the funders in category A do not call for integrative methodology or the integration of findings, the main aim usually being to give equal opportunities to both monodisciplinary and interdisciplinary research.
The funders in this category tended not to indicate how they weighted and compared the expected outcomes of interdisciplinary and monodisciplinary research.In terms of research execution this could be problematic, given the difficulties faced by interdisciplinary scholars in an academic environment that still tends to reward and give stronger recognition to research done in traditional academic disciplines (Salmela, MacLeod, and Munck af Rosenschöld 2021;Schikowitz 2020).

Category B) Researcher-Led Funding with an Interdisciplinary Scope
Category B covers programmes focusing on interdisciplinary research.Research teams generally aim at knowledge integration, and at otherwise genuine collaboration between disciplines.This manifested in some of the programmes as calls for proposals (both monodisciplinary and interdisciplinary) involving working in an interdisciplinary environment (e.g. the ZiF programme at the University of Bielefeld).The category also supports collaboration across various academic institutions and even countries.The exact definition of research questions is left to academics, and supported areas are usually defined via disciplines.
The target of supporting epistemically oriented interdisciplinarity is the most visible in this category.By way of demonstrating interdisciplinarity, applicants usually need to comply with specific institutional or disciplinary conditions, which may be geographical (e.g.team members from more than one country or institution) or discipline-specific (e.g.including disciplines from at least two categories mentioned by the funder).One noteworthy example of this type of programme is the DFG Priority Programme (Germany) that aims to advance interdisciplinary research in the sciences and in the humanities.However, the overall number of programmes is quite modest (17% of all the funding programmes).A major proportion of them are in German-speaking countries.

Category C) Thematic and Strategic Funding in Practice-Oriented Areas
Category C covers research done in practice-oriented fields or disciplines.Medicine and health sciences are dominant in this category (9 of 33 programmes).The primary aim of the programmes is to make an academic contribution.Funders tend to define the research in terms of specific topics rather than disciplines.Examples of the issues and topics addressed include personalised medicine, epigenetics, neural and cognitive systems, data science, genomics and global health: most of them belong to the domain traditionally investigated in STEM fields.Topics such as data science, global health, modern plant science and nanostructured materials also tend to require expertise from STEM disciplines.There are some exceptions, however, such as funding investigations into the challenges and changes attributable to the coronavirus pandemic (Volkswagen Foundation), ageing societies (also the Volkswagen Foundation) and future manufacturing (National Science Foundation).These programmes also called for contributions from SSH fields, thereby highlighting the importance of contributing to academic discussion.
The primary aim of the funders in Category C is to advance scientific understanding, whereas the question of a non-academic impact receives scant attention at best.The collaborating disciplines may be cognitively close to each other.Several of the programmes call for contributions from methodology-oriented areas, such as computer and information sciences.
One notable funder in this category is the National Science Foundation (US) with its 'Ten Big Ideas' programme.The data set contains only a few of the calls from this general programme, but its impact is bigger than what is indicated by this data.The 'Ten Big Ideas' programme, launched in 2017, funds research on topics of societal significance, primarily aiming at making an academic contribution.One pressing issue in this category is the relative absence of SSH: not many programmes would have offered this type of Funding for SSH research.An interesting exception in this data set is the Volkswagen foundation: one of the programmes ('Aging Societies') went so far as to state that representatives of SSH fields needed to have leading positions in projects combining expertise from STEM and SSH areas.

Category D) Transdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Funding
Category D comprises funding programmes with a mixed orientation aimed at making both an academic and a societal impact.Most of them have transdisciplinary elements, calling for the inclusion of non-academic collaborators and stakeholders.The aspect of knowledge integration is not stressed as much as in category C. Some funders state openly that they promote multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, and in other cases, although not clearly articulated, this orientation can be read in-between the lines.
Almost of the programmes in this category either encouraged or necessitated the inclusion of SSH in the research teams.This reflects the nature of the research topics to some extent, which include matters connected to the study of the societal world.Funded topics included ageing, sustainability, food production, energy transition, security studies, climate change and education.Some national funders structured these calls drawing from a list of national research priorities.SSH contributions were invited from areas including economics, law and psychology.In all cases the groups were also expected to be engaging or collaborating with non-academic audiences.Potential extra-academic commitments included advising policymakers, engaging in public dialogue and research dissemination, and collaborating with civic society more broadly as well as with the voluntary sector.I address the implications of these preferences in the discussion section.
The European Union is a major funder in this category, to which most Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe in 'coordination and support action' belong.Several national public research funders (including the UK, the Netherlands, Ireland, New Zealand and Finland) also regularly issue such calls, usually drawing from pre-set general lists of national research priorities.

Category E) R&D Funding with ID Recognition
The fifth category, R&D funding with crossdisciplinary characteristics, covers programmes with an instrumental orientation, which require the delivery of practical solutions and ideas.They resemble traditional research & development (R&D) programmes, the only main difference being that the calls mention the word interdisciplinarity.This data set did not include many these types of programmes, but this exclusion can be caused by the scope of the Research Professional database.Other studies indicate that SSH fields are not frequent actors in this type of R&D collaboration.Graddy-Reed and Lanahan (2023) estimate that between 1995 and 2005, US federal funding for R&D was distributed in the following way: life sciences receiving the greatest level of federal support (64%), followed by mathematical and physical sciences (15.3%), engineering (14.9%).The social sciences and psychology received the least federal funding for R&D research, 4.8% of total funding (Graddy-Reed and Lanahan 2023).
These programmes fund projects in which researchers work closely with industry and companies.As a sign of mutual benefit, companies are expected to provide some of the funding.The only exception to this requirement concerned the 'challenge-led grants' from the Global Challenges Research Fund.
The smaller funding programmes only have practical targets, whereas the more extensive ones also include research-related goals.All the EU Horizon 2020 funding programmes in the 'Research and Innovation Action' and 'European Innovation Ecosystems' in Horizon Europe that mention interdisciplinarity also fall into this category.A sign of the limited role of interdisciplinarity here is that although the word may feature in the call, many of the programmes also support disciplinary research if it suits the purpose otherwise.

Discussion
After finding out the key elements in different categories, I reflected these characteristics against the previous discussion on interdisciplinarity and research funding.Key sources of discussion about the dynamics between disciplines in interdisciplinary interaction, and the impact of societal problemsolving to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research.Observations arising from the data set both challenge and confirm these current views.There are four key observations emerging from this analysis: 1) the attraction of multidisciplinarity for SSH subjects; 2) two ways of funding research on societal challenges; 3) the relative absence of funding for interdisciplinary programmes prioritising social sciences and humanities (SSH); and 4) expectations of SSH for transdisciplinary engagement.Below I discuss these issues in turn.

1) The Attraction of Multidisciplinarity for SSH
One of the cornerstones of interdisciplinarity is the target of knowledge integration.It manifests, for example, in the inclusion of empirical material and data from several disciplinary domains and of methods from several disciplines, as well as in the use of various theoretical tools in synthesising and contrasting concepts, models and theories (Huutoniemi et al. 2010).It stands in opposition to multidisciplinary research, in which scholars from several disciplinary communities work together or arrange common activities, but the main contributions and research targets are disciplinefocused.Stamm (2019) points to a connection between strategic top-down funding and multidisciplinarity, arguing that the former increases the likelihood of the latter, and that the teams contribute primarily to their own disciplines.The scope of this study is limited to initial funding conditions, and hence it cannot evaluate the outcomes of research funding along the multidisciplinarity/interdisciplinarity spectrum.However, it does reveal that, given the differences in typical SSH and STEM targets in interdisciplinary funding, it is more likely that SSH will be given goals that promote multidisciplinarity.
Even though both categories C and D define the social challenges they aim to address, their targets and approach are very different.Category C stresses the importance of integration whereas category D does not; category C tends to either exclude SSH, or to select very few SSH disciplines, whereas category D lists representatives as suitable or even optimal partners.Category C lacks transdisciplinary engagement, whereas category D often involves co-production and joint actions with non-academic actors.Research outputs in category C are primarily academic publications, whereas in category D the actions also extend beyond the academic community.Together, these conditions set category C in the academic realm and discussion, and category D at the sciencesociety interface.
Another major difference between categories C and D concerns narrow and broad interdisciplinarity, which has implications for research management and execution.Interdisciplinary research tends to cross both institutional and cognitive boundaries, which are stronger in broad than in narrow interdisciplinarity (MacLeod 2018).Cognitive constraints include differences in elements such as evidential standards and epistemic values, as well as in modelling practices, the inconsistent use of concepts and the opacity of practices due to their complexity (MacLeod and Nagatsu 2016).MacLeod and Nagatsu (2016) further point out that cognitive difficulties in interdisciplinarity should not be trivialised as communication problems: usually they are attributable to deep epistemological differences in traditions and values within disciplines, and their modification is difficult without making substantial and often impractical changes.The findings from the present study show that SSH disciplines are more likely to work under conditions characterised by broad interdisciplinarity, whereas there are more opportunities for STEM fields to engage in narrow interdisciplinarity.
Multidisciplinary is well-suited to addressing societal challenges, as different disciplines can investigate and enhance understanding of various aspects of urgent issues without needing to develop an interdisciplinary framework (Mennes 2020).With regard to the poor academic standing of multidisciplinarity, Mennes (2020) argues that in many cases the research design facilitates the production of relevant and broad knowledge that sheds light on a societal issue.It may also contribute preliminary knowledge in large-scale research projects for the purposes of policymaking (Mennes 2020).However, research funders need to recognise these merits.Mennes (2020) adopts a cautionary tone: a preference among funders for interdisciplinarity over multidisciplinarity will have harmful effects on researchers (who must present their crossdisciplinary projects as interdisciplinary), as well as on research evaluation (in that different forms of crossdisciplinary research need different assessment criteria).The findings reported here confirm Mennes's observation concerning the poor recognition of multidisciplinarity by research funders, as most funding opportunities focus more strongly on interdisciplinarity.Nevertheless, there were some significant examples of funders highlighting their support for multidisciplinary research, including in the general strategic plan of Horizon Europe (European Commission 2021a).
There are various disciplinary dynamics in interdisciplinary collaboration.Integration as a target does not imply that all participating disciplines have equal opportunities to participate in the definition of research problems and goals.Brister (2016) uses the notion of disciplinary capture to describe a situation in which the standards, value commitments and methodological presuppositions of one discipline impact the formation of interdisciplinary collaboration, regardless of the preferences of other disciplines.A similar notion is scientific subordination, meaning that a subordinating field controls the setting of the research agenda by taking over the explanatory and empirical practices of another discipline (MacLeod 2018).Given that SSH subjects rarely have the most dominant positions in interdisciplinary collaboration in terms of funding and management (Kania and Bucksch 2020;Stamm, Møller, and Hetel 2015), it seems likely that they are in greater danger of becoming victims of this type of action.
Even though interdisciplinary research is often characterised as an endeavour with high risks and high rewards (Lyall et al. 2015;Mennes 2020), not all interdisciplinarity ends up being so risky.MacLeod and Nagatsu (2018) identify several crystallised practices in interdisciplinary modelling strategies that limit the novelty and transformation of methodological work.Such practices are more likely to emerge when the research questions derive from realworld problems rather than more theoretical considerations, and when the project's funding period is too narrow to enable the development of assembled practices.Problems such as these are particularly pressing when there are substantial cognitive differences among the participating disciplines (MacLeod and Nagatsu 2018; Mennes 2020).Most of the funded projects analysed in this study were destined to last between one and three years, and continuous funding covering more than five years was exceptional.This finding signals that researchers funded by these programmes did not have much time to build common ground, increasing the attraction of multidisciplinarity particularly in projects characterised by broad interdisciplinarity.
One way of improving the position of SSH in interdisciplinarity is to strengthen their leading role, for example via formal conditions.The main targets of research projects tend to be set during the initial planning and management stages (Lyall et al. 2015).Offering SSH fields central roles in the research, such as listing them as principal investigators, reduces the likelihood of disciplinary capture or scientific subordination (Lyall et al. 2015).For example, in the present study the Volkswagen Foundation (Germany) announced annual challenge-oriented funding opportunities aimed primarily at academic contributions, expecting SSH researchers to have a leading position.In 2021, for example, support was offered for research on 'European challenges in Ageing Societies', framed thus: 'The call targets scholars in the humanities, social and cultural sciences, as these fields are often still missing in research on ageing'.This type of decision shows that it is possible for research funders to support SSH fields while targeting the study of societal challenges.

2) Societal Challenges Can Call for Either Academic or Societal Impact -but for SSH, Mainly the Latter
Research policy in the last twenty years has emphasised the importance of societal problem-solving, and several funders have launched programmes with targets such as enhancing safety, equality, prosperity and wellbeing (Böschen 2019;Maasen and Dickel 2019).This development has proceeded under many different names, including Mode-2 knowledge production and 'strategic' research, based on the assumption that societal problems raise novel issues for researchers to investigate, and that the results of these investigations are societally useful (Gibbons et al. 1994;Stokes 1997).The term 'grand challenges' is often used in research policy to legitimise funding decisions related to topics with societal importance, including climate change and pandemics (Kaldewey 2017).Many research problems built around societal challenges cross disciplinary boundaries, and it is not uncommon for funders to expect co-production with non-academic partners.
Societal challenges are visible in this study in categories C and D, as funders named one or several societal issues they aimed to support.Together, these two categories represent over half of the available interdisciplinary funding opportunities, and this amount does not even recognise the great impact of Horizon Europe and the National Science Foundation.SSH are frequently listed as suitable candidates in category D, although excluded from category C.
The results of this study show that the idea of societal challenges can be used both to legitimise academically oriented research and research aimed at societal impact.Even though the programmes in category C named one or more societal challenges, the primary aim of the research projects was knowledge integration, and the expected outputs were academic contributions.Knowledge integration was not typically expected in category D, however, and more emphasis was placed on nonacademic contributions and transdisciplinary collaboration.
Most of the disciplines listed in category C represent practice-oriented research.Practice-oriented research areas include pharmacy and medicine, agriculture and food production, ICT, sustainability, safety, energy technology and the production of high-tech materials (Boon and Van Baalen 2018;Thorén and Persson 2013).They typically reflect cognitive divergence, given the variation among researchers in training and background, and researchers draw from knowledge generated in several domains (Andersen 2016).Such a preference may put SSH in a suboptimal position at the outset, particularly if research targets and optimal collaborators are defined such that the expertise on offer is dismissed as irrelevant.There is ongoing discussion concerning how to increase SSH contributions in practice-related areas, such as energy technology and climate sciences (Overland and Sovacool 2020).The findings from this study indicate that many funders of challenge-based research still have a somewhat conservative approach when thinking the potential roles of SSH in practice-oriented areas.Kania and Bucksch (2020) note that there is a tendency for funders to favour selected disciplines, most commonly law and economics, instead of giving opportunities widely for diverse SSH disciplines. 8This study supports their observation.Even though category C concerns real-world phenomena, funders do not usually name SSH as relevant disciplines for studying these topics, or then they invite contributions from SSH very selectively.One reason for this is the dominance of medicine and health in category C, in which potential contributions from SSH are very limited.However, it does not explain everything.In topics connected to the environment and data studies, there might be more potential roles for SSH.Furthermore, we can also ask whether it might make sense for funders to treat challenges arising from socio-cultural world as topics that also require contributions to academic discussion rather than usually to societal contributions.These preferences signal an ongoing need to support the inclusion of SSH disciplines in funding programmes on societal challenges, and to foster practices and targets that enable them to make interdisciplinary, academic contributions.

3) Expectation of SSH for Transdisciplinary Engagement
Most transdisciplinary research is motivated by social interests and issues, and academic disciplines work jointly with non-academic actors to find solutions to real-world problems (Ash 2019).The inclusion of non-academic actors is sometimes justified on the grounds that such groups make science more reliable and responsible (Maasen and Dickel 2019;Vienni Baptista and Rojas-Castro 2020).I have shown above that it is quite rare for research funders to offer SSH fields opportunities involving narrow interdisciplinarity, especially in research programmes connected to societal challenges.Such findings raise another issue, namely the relationship between SSH and transdisciplinarity.Projects with SSH members were frequently offered challenge-based funding only on the condition that they would also have transdisciplinary goals.
There are several examples in category D about the potential non-academic research team members.Such actors included government ministries and market regulators (e.g.'Innovation of supervision' by NWO), patients and healthcare providers (e.g. in Horizon Europe), and regulatory bodies and policy-makers (e.g. in Horizon Europe).Horizon 2020 guidelines draw from Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), requiring researchers to develop outreach and partnership with potential actors in research and innovation, aiming at wider engagement with stakeholders and the general public (European Commission 2020).Horizon Europe continues this approach, calling for co-design activities among scientists and stakeholders (European Commission 2021a). 9 Research teams have diverse strategies in responding to this requirement for transdisciplinarity.Given the difficulty of combining knowledge in scientific and societal arenas, research projects may allocate tasks such that only some researchers are engaged in collaboration with non-academic actors (Felt et al. 2016).These actions have been analysed in the discussion on boundary work, showing how researchers employ several strategies when working with non-academic partners (Fujimura 1987;Möllers 2017).A typical non-academic activity in this category is advising on policy.Meanwhile, these conditions also increase the likelihood of disciplinary capture and scientific subordination.
This analysis focused on the initial conditions of research rather than the outcomes.It is thus beyond the scope of this paper to assess the potentially divergent impacts of transdisciplinarity on SSH and other areas of research and science.However, what can be said is that when SSH fields are included in interdisciplinary research, the goals of the programmes typically include transdisciplinary engagement.This aspect, again, attests to the importance of active research management and of having enough time and other resources to create a constructive dialogue between disciplines (Stamm 2019;Viseu 2015).If researchers in SSH subject areas are only able to join research projects after the main goals have been set, it is very difficult for them to step outside of the 'service' role (Viseu 2015).

4) The Relative Absence of Funding Projects Prioritising Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH)
There are many fewer interdisciplinary funding opportunities for SSH than there are for STEM.This is one of the most visible observations arising from this data set.SSH were frequent collaborators in categories A, B and D, while having a less significant role in categories C and E. Categories A and B are epistemically oriented, and researchers have quite a lot of flexibility in defining their goals.The funding bodies also offer a long list of suitable disciplines and forms of disciplinary collaboration in these categories.Category A funds both monodisciplinary and interdisciplinary research, whereas category B only supports interdisciplinary research.Research projects in category B should aim at knowledge integration, and many candidates are also restricted by institutional conditions such as having to include units from several academic institutions or countries.Because category A also covers monodisciplinary research, category B covers most programmes with a specific aim of supporting interdisciplinary research in SSH disciplines that targets academic contributions.
One big challenge relates to the distribution between categories A-E: 18% (n = 23) of the funding programmes belonged to category A, compared with 22% (n = 22) in category B. This is much less than for mixed programmes: 25% (n = 32) of the funding programmes belonged to category C, and 30% (n = 39) to category D. There were 11 programmes in category E (9%).The dominance of challenge-based funding (categories C and D) shows that many interdisciplinary funding opportunities tend to have strategic targets.This prioritisation puts SSH fields in a suboptimal position, as they are not the most likely candidates in challenge-based research funding.
Even though the general trend in interdisciplinary funding is to prioritise research connected to social challenges, this trend is not uniform across geographic regions.There are differences between the US and the EU, as well as among European countries.German research policy commonly emphasises researcher autonomy and supports investigator-driven research, whereas countries such as the Netherlands and the UK tend to rely more on centralised research management and to adopt a more technology-oriented approach (Egeland, Forsberg, and Maximova-Mentzoni 2019;van der Molen et al. 2019).These preferences also have an impact on interdisciplinary funding.Research policies designed to address grand challenges are assigned divergent targets in the US and the EU (the term has been used in the US to legitimise science-business collaboration and academically ambitious research), whereas a major goal for research projects on grand challenges in the European Union is transdisciplinary engagement (Flink and Kaldewey 2018;Hicks 2016).The European Research Council has recognised the importance of supporting epistemically-oriented research, emphasising the need to provide funding opportunities both for 'bottom-up' research based on the researchers' own considerations and interests, and for strategic studies on designated themes (see European Research Council 2020).The results of the present study show that these various priorities are also visible in the organisation of interdisciplinarity in different national contexts.There are several visible and prevalent actions and programmes to support epistemically-oriented interdisciplinarity in the German-speaking world, such as the funding programmes offered by the DFG.However, as the limited proportions in categories A and B indicate, many other national and private funders of interdisciplinary research do not share these priorities.
One common way in which research funders pursue their aims to increase epistemically-oriented interdisciplinarity is to widen the criteria used in existing research-led grants.Several national funders have adopted this approach, stating that they fund both interdisciplinary and disciplinary research.However, one could ask if this approach is enough to increase the proportion of interdisciplinary research, particularly if the aim is to encourage the inclusion of SSH.Setting up interdisciplinary research requires time, active support and careful management, and conducting successful interdisciplinary research has many additional challenges compared with disciplinary research (e.g.Lyall et al. 2015;Repko and Szoztak 2017).This study underlines that it is necessary to pay attention to the conditions in which SSH can and is encouraged to enter interdisciplinary collaboration.To encourage SSH contributions, it is essential to recognise that the inclusion of these fields can require special consideration or actions.Further research is also needed to understand the typical roles or methodological conditions funders give to SSH when launching interdisciplinary funding programmes.

Conclusions
It has long been known that the position of SSH in interdisciplinary research is not as good as it could or should be (Viseu 2015).In this article, I have assessed the conditions of 127 funding programmes for interdisciplinary research offered by both public and non-profit funders in Europe and North America.The findings show that, despite calls in research policy to strengthen the position of social sciences and humanities in interdisciplinarity, the problem concerning their poor support and status is persistent and ongoing.
It has become increasingly common in science policy in the last couple of decades to claim that current grand challenges require a more comprehensive understanding of the interrelationship between the societal and the natural world (see e.g.Felt et al. 2016;Flink and Kaldewey 2018;Kaldewey 2017, Välikangas 2022).The results of this study indicate that research funders could still improve their practices regarding the inclusion of SSH, particularly in fields such as the arts, behavioural sciences, social sciences other than economics, and humanities.Some of the findings concern the quantity and others the quality of interdisciplinarity.Quantitatively, SSH are rarely offered opportunities to engage in epistemically-oriented interdisciplinarity, the primary target in research projects being their contribution to academic discussion.At the qualitative level, the study indicates that multidisciplinarity is a potentially fruitful strategy for SSH scholars engaged in crossdisciplinary research.
A large proportion of interdisciplinary funding is nowadays offered to societal issues or challenges.This study has shown that these sources do not offer SSH many opportunities involving narrow interdisciplinarity.Instead, it is typical to call for SSH contributions in projects with broad interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity.Under these conditions, it may be a reasonable strategy to focus on multidisciplinary research rather than research aimed at deeper knowledge integration.Together, the findings from this study show that there is still more to be done in research policy to improve the position of the SSH fields in interdisciplinarity, and in science policy and funding to recognise and learn from initiatives and programmes that challenge this general trend.

Notes
1. SSH disciplines cover social and behavioural sciences, educational sciences, journalism and information, business and administration, law, humanities and the arts (European Commission 2021c).2. Tuana (2013), for example, draws on the analysis of awards given by the National Science Foundation related to the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program, and Stamm (2019) covers the Horizon 2020 programme.3. I am thankful to anonymous review for this observation.4. The latest evaluation report published by the European Commission on the integration of SSH in the Horizon 2020 programme gives a more positive picture, identifying signs of 'encouraging development'.However, of the projects with SSH members, 18% had non-research-related tasks (project management or communication), and in more than half of those evidencing SSH engagement, the partners represented economics, business and marketing (28%) or political science and public administration (25%), whereas humanities and the arts contributed to only five percent of them (Kania and Bucksch 2020). 5.This inquiry was conducted via Google searches including interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity together with funding, and several country settings (UK, US, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Canada, Nordic countries).
6.The database covers all scholarly disciplines in both STEM and SSH.The sources range from the largest research councils to small private charities.The database covered all Pan-European funding and national data sets from Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, Sweden and the United Kingdom (Research professional 2022).7.However, we can reflect on the distribution between these categories against the Horizon Europe budget (€95.5 billion in 2021-2027).In it, 56% of funding is distributed to 'Global challenges and European industrial competitiveness' programme, corresponding to categories C and D in this study.'Excellent science' programme receives 26% of funding (corresponding to categories A and B) and 'Innovative Europe' (category E) 15% of total funding (European Commission 2021b; see also Graddy-Reed and Lanahan 2023).8.For example, it is stated in the 2020 evaluation report of the integration of social sciences and humanities in Horizon 2020 and the European Research Council that almost two-thirds of the experts in research projects in which SSH fields made genuine contributions had a background in either 'Economics, business and marketing' (most often economics) or 'Political science, public administration and law' (usually law).All areas of humanities and the arts contributed only in five percent of the research projects (Kania and Bucksch 2020).9.These targets do not necessarily imply that the projects include collaborators from various social domains.In recent years it has become increasingly frequent in Horizon 2020 programmes to have business enterprises as non-academic collaborators (Conceição et al. 2020).
(A) Researcher-led funding programmes for both monodisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies; (B) Researcher-led funding with an interdisciplinary scope; (C) Thematic and strategic funding in practice-oriented areas; (D) Transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary funding; and (E) R&D funding with ID recognition.

Graph 2 .
Distribution of funding programmes into different categories and by the sources of funding.Graph 1. Distribution of funding programmes into different categories.SSH.SSH disciplines were frequently listed as collaborators in categories B and D, while being frequently excluded from categories C and E. Graph 3 shows the inclusion and exclusion of SSH in different categories.

Table 1 .
Five categories of interdisciplinary funding programmes.

Table 2 .
Funding programmes by country and type of funder.
Graph 3. Inclusion and exclusion of SSH in different categories.