Orchestrating GenAI for Interdisciplinary Research
TL;DR
Findings show that researchers leaned on GenAI to fill knowledge gaps while maintaining epistemic agency for novelty discovery, and an expertise paradox was uncovered: GenAI outputs were hardest to verify when most needed.
Abstract
As researchers tackle interdisciplinary problems, they face the need to deepen expertise in primary areas while rapidly acquiring knowledge in secondary domains. Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly positioned to meet this need, from general-purpose chat assistants to Deep Research tools marketed as autonomous research agents. Prior work has examined how researchers use GenAI to support single-discipline or general research tasks. However, we know little about the goals and GenAI practices in interdisciplinary research. We conducted a longitudinal study and semi-structured interviews with 15 interdisciplinary researchers to examine how interdisciplinary researchers actually orchestrate GenAI. Findings show that researchers leaned on GenAI to fill knowledge gaps while maintaining epistemic agency for novelty discovery. We also uncovered an expertise paradox: GenAI outputs were hardest to verify when most needed. Our empirical insights motivate GenAI designs that calibrate verification to researchers'expertise, nudge toward cross-domain synthesis, and adapt prompting and outputs to disciplinary conventions.
