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Monitoring and evaluating interdisciplinarity is crucial for informing decisions about interdisciplinary (ID) policies, funding, and work. Yet, the recent explosion of ID assessment approaches represents an overwhelming buffet of options that has produced little consensus, limited guidance, and minimal insights into interdisciplinarity and its value to society. This article extends findings from a companion study that systematically reviewed the ID assessment field from 2000 to 2019. Engaging with the same extensive dataset but in a new way, we employ typological analysis and condense 1,006 published assessment designs into just five main assessment approaches called Pathway Profiles. We then tailor assessment guidance to each Pathway Profile, including potential settings in which each could be most useful and ways each could be modified to reduce challenges and increase rigor. Our goal in defining and interacting with the core of the ID assessment field in this way is not only to clarify activity in this vast and disjointed space but also to simplify and facilitate processes of understanding, choosing from, and strategically developing this diverse landscape. Pathway Profiles can be used as heuristic gateways to the ID assessment field, particularly when it comes to finding relevant examples, adapting designs to situations, and ultimately uncovering the true outcomes of interdisciplinarity.

In many sectors and in many respects, interdisciplinarity has made progress in recent decades, but less so when it comes to evaluating interdisciplinary work. Challenges remain, especially regarding what counts as ‘good’ interdisciplinarity. While previous reviews describe broad trends contributing to these challenges, high-level observations are less suited to: (1) pinpointing underlying sources of persistent evaluative issues, (2) capturing less frequent counterexamples and emerging trends, and (3) providing practical guidance for moving the field forward. This article presents a novel approach for excavating and analyzing assessment designs within and across a wide range of published studies. It is the first study to structure its review of interdisciplinary evaluation around the basics of evaluation theory, creating a simplified model of assessment design choices called an assessment pathway. It further stands alone as an extensive systematic review of the interdisciplinary literature uniquely placed within the context of evaluation, encompassing 20 years, 142 studies, 1,006 assessment pathways, and 19,114 data points. Results show that while interdisciplinary assessments to date excel at variation, only 12% of identified pathways contain the minimum elements required to reach an evaluative judgment. Increased attention to evaluation theory can catalyze progress and provide structure and shared language to a highly varied domain. Readers can visually explore the full dataset online and download it from Harvard’s Dataverse.