Robin Hanson links to this fascinating map of science which shows how scientific fields relate to one another based on co-citation analysis.
It makes a lot of sense of vague intuitions I have had about which sort of fields are related to what other fields. Economics is off on the left corner, cosmology is the top corner, and computer science hangs out between the two. And the stuff I find really boring is far away from that side.
I've ordered a printed version. I'd love to see where my papers sit in this space, and how the space has changed over the decades.
My main complaint: They arbitrarily included only "science" publications. So not only can't I see how economics relates to philosophy or literary criticism, they've foregone our best chance to define "science" in a practical way. It is famously hard to offer a coherent definition for what are "scientific" fields. But if we could see on a graph like this that "science" topics were clustered away from the rest, that would give us the best definition of "science" we are likely to get.
Just clicking around the website a bit, I see many examples of economic concepts in action such as division of labor and specialization among geographical regions and institutions. The complex web formed also provides great visual support for illustrating how knowledge is decentralized.
I am very intrigued by the insights social network analysis can give and would love see more examples of these types of graphics being generated.
Read more about this map and see higher resolution copies of it. You can also order your free poster of it here.
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