Blueprints for Success - Guidelines for Building Multidisciplinary Collaboration Teams

Finding collaborators to engage in academic research is a challenging task, especially when the collaboration is multidisciplinary in nature and collaborators are needed from different disciplines. This paper uses evidence of successful multidisciplinary collaborations, funded proposals, in a novel way: as an input for a method of recommendation of multidisciplinary collaboration teams. We attempt to answer two questions posed by a collaboration seeker: what disciplines provide collaboration opportunities and what combinations of characteristics of collaborators have been successful in the past? We describe a two-step recommendation framework where the first step recommends potential disciplines with collaboration potential based on current trends in funding. The second step recommends characteristics for a collaboration team that are consistent with past instances of successful collaborations. We examine how this information source can be used in a case-based recommender system and present a preliminary validation of the system using statistical methods.