Table 3.

Characteristics of Multidisciplinary, Interdisciplinary, and Transdisciplinary Research

	Participants/ Discipline	Problem Definition	Research Style	Presentation of Findings	Examples from Infectious Disease Literature
Multidisciplinary	Two or more disciplines	Same question but different paradigm OR different but related questions	“Parallel play”	Separate publications by participants from each discipline	Medicaid cost containment and access to prescription drugs, Cunningham (2005),Lichtenberg (2005): The effect of access restrictions on the vintage of drugs used by Medicaid enrollees
Interdisciplinary	Two or more distinct academic fields	Described/defined in language of at least two fields, using multiple models or intersecting models	Drawn from more than one, with multiple data sources and varying analysis of same data	Shared publications, with language intelligible to all involved fields	The “Minimizing Antibiotic Resistance in Colorado” Project: Impact of patient education in improving antibiotic use in private office practices, Gonzales et al. (2005)
Transdisciplinary	Two or more distinct academic fields	Stated in new language or theory that is broader than any one discipline	Fully synthesized methods, may result in new field	Shared publications, probably using at least some new language developed for translation across traditional lines	Assessing the implementation of the Chronic Care Model in quality improvement collaboratives, Pearson et al. (2005)