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Cet article est la réflexion commune de quatre « jeunes chercheurs » sur les pratiques d’évaluation de la recherche interdisciplinaire. Nous souhaitons comprendre comment qualifier des registres d’interdisciplinarité afin d’accroître leur transparence méthodologique. Nous proposons tout d’abord un état des lieux des modes d’objectivation de l’interdisciplinarité. Puis nous insistons sur le caractère continuellement inédit de la construction des objets interdisciplinaires, appelant la création de catégories d’évaluation dynamiques. Nous proposons enfin une boussole à cinq axes afin d’orienter l’évaluation des pratiques interdisciplinaires sur l’interface natures/sciences/sociétés : dynamique temporelle de l’interdisciplinarité, distance disciplinaire des différents corpus, dimension collective de la recherche, formes d’engagement dans le débat public et portée extra-académique.

Reflexive patterns of interdisciplinarity. A compass for research linking nature and societyThis paper opens new avenues for reflection on interdisciplinarity via the combinatory perspective that four “young researchers” propose on research evaluation practices, including editorial practices, call for proposals, teaching, recruitment, etc. For instance, all interdisciplinary journals impose specific requirements on their incoming authors. With this paper we wish to take their standpoint in order to highlight, discuss and organize these requirements into a usable product – a compass – that could eventually guide processes of interdisciplinary work evaluation. Therefore, our analysis is driven by the question of how to qualify patterns of interdisciplinarity in order to improve the methodological transparency of evaluation practices. Further, taking the example of editorial practices we start by presenting a brief inventory of the way in which interdisciplinarity gets objectified through practices, from the identification of the authors’ disciplinary background via their institutional affiliations to the acknowledgement of combinatory approaches via the use of bibliometric measures. We then insist on the scarcely fixable, ever-changing character of the construction of interdisciplinary objects. We take this feature as the stepping point to revisit evaluation categories in order to make them more suitable to the dynamic process of interdisciplinary construction. Our goal is not to provide an additional analysis of the interdisciplinary object itself ; rather we aim to provide a tool to scrutinize the author’s interdisciplinary intents in relation to his/her own creation of the research object and his/her own objectivation perspective. Therefore, we propose a compass consisting of 5 axes, each reflecting a specific aspect of interdisciplinary practices at the interface between natures/sciences/societies : temporal dynamics of interdisciplinarity, distance between disciplines, collective dimensions of research practice, style of engagement in public debate and extra-academic scope.