The increasing importance of interdisciplinary research presents challenges in evaluating the quality of such research, and the urgency for academic journals to select appropriate interdisciplinary reviewers. We conducted a study examing the research, reviewing, and editorial activities of top reviewers in the Cross-field category (abbreviated as active interdisciplinary reviewers) provided by Publons. Our findings indicate that active interdisciplinary reviewers are often highly interdisciplinary researchers, and a significant correlation between the interdisciplinarity of their research and reviewing activities reinforces this observation. Moderately experienced reviewers are the primary force behind interdisciplinary reviewing, and senior reviewers with longer research and reviewing experience are particularly advantageous for studies with knowledge across multiple disciplines. Based on our results, we recommend prioritizing reviewers for interdisciplinary research who demonstrate higher interdisciplinarity in both research and reviewing activities, as they may have better reviewing performance.

With a combination of new data sources and mixed methods including bibliometrics, machine learning and network analysis, this study puts forward a new framework of categorizing different interdisciplinary collaboration patterns from a discipline-contribution perspective. Based on 20,542 research articles published on PLoS series of journals in 2018, 14,744 articles with interdisciplinary collaborations (ICAs) are recognized. By establishing six indicators that measure the variety, similarity and balance of authors’ disciplines and their contribution roles, ICAs are divided into four categories after the agglomerative hierarchical clustering. With a fine-grained analysis of the structural and correlation characteristics of authors’ disciplines and contribution in different clusters, four interdisciplinary collaboration patterns of sheep flock, bee colony, intercropping and rainforest are found. Our results may contribute to developing new methodologies and theories of interdisciplinary collaboration, and enrich the understanding of interdisciplinary collaboration as well as relevant policies.