Slashdot Mirror
How Scientific Paradigms Relate
Here is a giant chart mapping relationships among scientific paradigms, as published in the journal Nature. This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as pale circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers. Information Esthetics, an organization founded by map co-creator W. Bradford Paley, is giving away 25" x 24" prints of the Map of Science (you pay postage and handling via PayPal). There are also links to a 3000+ pixel wide jpg of the chart. It would be all one long spectrum except for Computer Science, which makes the connection (via AI) between the hard sciences and the soft sciences.
That poster looks like Edward Tufte got sick after trying to make sense of all that information.
Joke aside, it's gorgeous in the pure organic feel of it, but not particularly informative other than illustrative.
[
Here's a hint: it's a science chart.
You might as well be complaining that they didn't include snowboarding.
How we know is more important than what we know.
To closely quote Wikipedia, a paradigm is the set of practices that define a scientific discipline during a particular period of time. A paradigm is defined by science historian Thomas Kuhn to comprise the following:
It looks to me as if this chart does not show connectedness among "paradigms". It simply shows connectedness among various areas of study (as measured in terms of clusterings of bibliography citations).
A paradigm change is something that happens within a single area of study, such as geology or linguistics. To look at connectedness among "paradigms", you'd have to look at the history of single fields, not the current interconnectedness among different fields.
It's just generated directly from what's been published. It's not biased; this is just what people are working on.
One thing to note is that they generated this based on journal papers. As Computer Science is mostly a conference-driven field, there are relatively few papers published in CS journals.
In math, it's extremely difficult to publish journal papers, and a single mathematician could not output the volume of papers that a biologist could. That could be reflected the size disparity.
And the rest is probably due to the bias of the people that came up with the "paradigms" and how they link together (I'd wager they are much more familiar with the biological sciences than with math/CS).
"Their bad categorization of Engineering reinforces my belief that there really is a bias."
Engineering is not science, so yes it is biased against engineering in the same way as it is biased against architecture, sport, art, politics, and everything else that it is not trying to map.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If I remember the original Nature article correctly, it's based primarily on what journal research is published in. Thus if a journal claims to be focused on engineering, then articles published in that journal are in the subject of engineering. Links were made by citations between journal articles. They do say what journals they look at. They're selected by Thomson Scientific, who runs Web of Science, and I know they include IEEE journals.
I always laugh at people who try to re-define other people's professions. If the editor of a major engineering journal considers something engineering, then it is. Do you know whether IEEE publishes things which are applicable to astrophysics, or whether Physical Review Letters published topics relevant to engineers? What kind of person does nanotechnology research? Is it engineering, physics, chemistry or biology? These guys have a straightforward solution to these questions. Let the researchers define themselves by submitting their work to journals they consider important, and let the editors of those journals name their field.
I am thinking that this chart could be extremely useful for someone planning the layout for a university campus.
Peter