In academia, pedagogy, physical sciences, earth sciences, human sciences and social sciences in general, an interdisciplinary field is a term of art in the teaching professions, whereas the terms multidisciplinary field or C: interdisciplinary field have become the hallmark of many modern technical professions which must cross traditional academic boundaries as new needs and professions have emerged. Originally the term was applied within education and training pedagogies in reference to the needs of definition and qualities of studies that cut across several established disciplines or traditional fields of study as stimulated by the advance of knowledge. Subsequently, the term has also come to be applied to new professions such as geobiology and old fields such as psychiatry where the professional must have advanced credentials in several fields of study.

Interdisciplinarity factors involves researchers, students, and teachers in the goals of connecting and integrating several academic disciplines, professions, or technologies, along with their specific perspectives, in the pursuit of a common task. Interdisciplinary approaches typically focus on problems felt by the investigators to be too complex or vast to be dealt with the knowledge and tools of a single discipline, for example, the epidemiology of AIDS or global warming. The term may be applied where the subject is felt to have been neglected or even misrepresented in the traditional disciplinary structure of research institutions, for example, women's studies or ethnic area studies.

The adjective interdisciplinary is most often used in educational circles when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to the problem at hand, including the case of the team-taught course where students are required to understand a given subject in terms of multiple traditional disciplines. For example, the subject of land use may appear differently when examined by different disciplines, for instance, biology, chemistry, economics, geography, and politics.

In a sense, interdisciplinary involves attacking a subject from various angles and methods, eventually cutting across disciplines and forming a new method for understanding the subject. A common goal of understanding unites the various methods and acknowledges a common or shared subject or problem, even if it spreads to other disciplines.

Development

Although interdisciplinary and interdisciplinarity are frequently viewed as twentieth century terms, the concept has historical antecedents, most notably Greek philosophy. Ausburg, Tanya. Becoming Interdisciplinary: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies. 2nd edition. New York: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 2006. Julie Thompson Klein attests that "the roots of the concepts lie in a number of ideas that resonate through modern discourse—the ideas of a unified science, general knowledge, synthesis and the integration of knowledge" while Giles Gunn says that Greek historians and dramatists took elements from other realms of knowledge (such as medicine or philosophy) to further understand their own material.