Abstract
The Japanese Agricultural Systems Society was established in April, 1984 and the journal of the Society has published across a wide range of disciplines and at various levels of detail concerning agricultural systems since September, 1984. The Society and the journal have emphasized the need for interdisciplinarity in agriculture and aimed to integrate research methods of the social and natural sciences. In this paper, four different research styles were identified in social and natural sciences based on the difference of available data (qualitative vs. quantitative data) and research methods (explanatory vs, descriptive approaches) and it was suggested that agricultural system researches should accept all of the four research styles. Furthermore, framework and scope of agricultural system researches was discussed and a new direction of agricultural system research was demonstrated using system biology in life science as an example.
