In sustainability science, interdisciplinarity, i.e., the integration of perspectives from different disciplines, is built collectively from interactions among researchers of various disciplines (“collective interdisciplinarity”) but also results from the fact that researchers have backgrounds in multiple disciplines (“individual interdisciplinarity”). We applied social network analysis tools to analyze how individual interdisciplinarity influences collective interdisciplinarity, using the case of a forest sustainability science group. We hypothesized that researchers with higher individual interdisciplinarity had more interdisciplinary interactions and were interdisciplinary brokers within the group. We first analyzed individual interdisciplinarity using a bipartite network of researchers and disciplines. We then analyzed networks of management, research, and publication interactions among researchers in the research group. This showed how disciplines influenced interactions and how researchers contributed to interdisciplinary interactions and brokerage. Results of the first analysis identified large disciplinary communities in the center of the bipartite network, whereas smaller ones were more distant. The second analysis highlighted disciplinary homophily in interaction networks, as two researchers interacted more if they were from the same disciplinary community. Results also showed that the interactions among researchers were structured not only by disciplinary homophily, but also by other forms of homophily related to location or region of work. The key brokers of interactions across disciplinary communities were distributed across several communities, showing that brokerage was not controlled by the large, dominant communities. Analysis of correlations between individual interdisciplinarity and contributions to collective interdisciplinarity did not support our hypothesis but rather hinted at the alternative hypothesis that researchers with high individual interdisciplinarity interacted less with other disciplinary communities.

在可持续性科学中，跨学科性，即来自不同学科的观点的整合，是由各个学科的研究人员之间的相互作用共同建立的（“集体跨学科”），也是由于研究人员具有多个学科的背景这一事实（“个体跨学科”）导致的）。我们以森林可持续性科学小组为例，应用社交网络分析工具来分析个人跨学科性如何影响集体跨学科性。我们假设具有较高个人跨学科性的研究人员具有更多的跨学科相互作用，并且是该组内的跨学科经纪人。我们首先使用研究人员和学科的双向网络分析了个人的跨学科性。然后，我们分析了管理网络，研究，以及研究组中研究人员之间的出版物互动。这表明学科如何影响相互作用，研究人员如何促进跨学科的相互作用和经纪。首次分析的结果确定了两方网络中心的大型学科社区，而较小的学科社区则较远。第二项分析突出了交互网络中的学科同质性，因为如果两个研究人员来自同一个学科社区，则他们会进行更多的交互。结果还表明，研究人员之间的相互作用不仅由学科同质性构成，而且还由与工作地点或地区有关的其他同质性形式构成。跨学科社区互动的主要中介人分布在多个社区中，表明经纪不受大型主导社区的控制。个体跨学科性与对集体跨学科性的贡献之间的相关性分析并不支持我们的假设，而是暗示了另一种假设，即个体跨学科性高的研究人员与其他学科群体的互动较少。