This article aims to provide an analysis of scientific literature on sustainability as expressed in sets of papers in the areas of ecology, economics, sociology and anthropology. Fifteen works were selected from the twenty-five most cited articles in each of these areas in the ISI-Web of Science, between 1990 and 2010. The conceptual frameworks that establish the term 'sustainability' in each area were observed, aiming to understand how they approach the dualisms - the interfaces "human / non-human" and "science / policy" - present in the discourses on sustainability. The analysis focused on the tension between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in establishing the relationship between scientific artifact and political proactiveness. To this end, the analysis was based on three dimensions of the discourse: the concepts of interaction between human and nonhuman; the definitions of risk and threat; and the strategies for coping with sustainability issues. This triad was based on the theory of reflexive modernization and on the social studies of science. In the four sets of papers, two possible fields for interdisciplinary connection were observed, which were called "ecologization" and "politicization", both guided by a sense of "interdisciplinarity by continuity".
Interdisciplinarity; Anthropology; Ecology; Economy; Sociology; Sustainability