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On 4 February 2020, the renowned journal Nature published in their news blog a contribution entitled,“What are fake interdisciplinary collaborations and why do they occur?”(Dai, 2020). This question spells out an often only tacitly acknowledged phenomenon: while the list of co-authors on a publication might imply interdisciplinary collaboration,“no knowledge integration occurs”, and researchers actually simply “end up working on their individual and mono-disciplinary research separately”(Dai, 2020). The contribution thus points at a tension. Policymakers on the European and national levels, funding agencies, and many academic institutions increasingly call for more inter-and trans-disciplinary research (IDR/TDR), in order to address complex societal challenges, and have even instituted often normatively defined new funding lines (see, eg, Vienni Baptista et al., 2020). However, simultaneously, we also have …