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.

Comments

Re:Engineering & Computer Science

[QuantumG]

Here's a hint: it's a science chart.

You might as well be complaining that they didn't include snowboarding.

Paradigm != field of study

[kurisuto]

I think that this is a misuse of the word "paradigm."

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:

• what is to be observed and scrutinized,
• the kind of questions that are supposed to be asked and probed for answers in relation to this subject,
• how these questions are to be structured,
• how the results of scientific investigations should be interpreted.

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.

Re:It's terribly biased

[TapeCutter]

"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.