Map of science

I've always liked maps; it must be in my genes considering that both my parents are cartographers. So when I saw this strange looking map with lines connecting colored dots, I was intrigued, I looked up the corresponding article in Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE and although I didn't understand much of it, I still find this very cool.



Each colored dot represents a scientific journal, grouped by discipline: pink and blue indicate physics and chemistry, green indicates biology, red indicates medicine, and yellow and white represent social sciences and humanities, respectively. The results come from internet databases that record visits to and downloads from each of the journals' sites and somehow this way it's possible to map patterns of interest and cross-journal citations, supposedly, anonymously.

Although Immunology is not on there, I imagine it would be somewhere in the Microbiology or maybe Genetics interest group. Also interesting is that Social Sciences and the Humanities seem to be in a central position, sort of connecting different disciplines with each other. It's interesting to see these trends and to realize that everything is interconnected in a way and people are interested in a wide range of topics, not just their little niche of science. As a scientist in training, I know how easy it is to get stuck only reading articles on the narrow field that one is studying - as one of my lab-mates sometimes says half jokingly while we are walking to our weekly Immunology seminars "this talk is not about macrophages, why should we care?" - and I have been trying to make an effort to catch up on different scientific topics. I find that a really good way to do that is by following science blogs and then looking up the the original articles when something catches my eye. This is how I found this map and I am glad I came across it.

Citation: Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science. By Johan Bollen, Herbert Van de Sompel, Aric Hagberg, Luis Bettencourt, Ryan Chute, Marko A. Rodriguez, Lyudmila Balakireva. Public Library of Science ONE, March 11, 2009.