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.

Mainstream patent indicators focus on inventions protected in large economies, but the world economic landscape has changed so much that their legitimacy has been questioned. Therefore, we propose the concept of non-unilateral patents, defined as patents filed simultaneously at two or more national/regional patent offices and granted in at least one of these offices. Compared with existing indicators (e.g., IP5 patents, triadic patents, and overseas patents), this indicator improves statistical efficiency while reducing the impact of home bias based on single-country patent applications and filtering out relatively low-value patents. More importantly, a significant advantage of the novel indicator is that it improves the visibility of different economies in globalization and can better adapt to the dynamic world landscape.