

Map of citation flow in science - lurkage
http://www.eigenfactor.org/map/maps.htm

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ComputerGuru
I was really surprised to see how little research is done in the CS fields
until I realized something: the lines only show the quantity of citations
going in and out _across different fields_.

They have bio and med listed separately when they're really closely tied - so
they naturally have a huge amount of information exchange going on between the
two, making for the seemingly-gargantuan research count/amonut for those
areas.

In CS, on the other hand, the amount of research _is_ huge (probably biggest
of all since the barrier of entry is so low and isn't limited to people of
that field alone); but it's mainly CS people citing other CS people's work(s).
We effectively live in a bubble, albeit a very huge one. We interact and share
with one another, but not that much with the rest of the industries - and we
probably should, since there's a lot of ideas in cyberspace that can be mapped
directly to real life.....

~~~
dissenter
The bubbles represent the size and importance of the field. This is an
accurate depiction of what science is like today.

 _Science_ and _Nature_ are filled with articles about medicine and biology
and chemistry and physics and so on. These are what scientists think of as
science. Rarely does a math or computer science paper slip in, except in the
case of groundbreaking new work. And yet most CS professors would give
anything to have a paper of theirs published in _Science_. So you can see how
the rest of science values our contributions: every once in a while we
contribute something interesting, but for the most part we are not noteworthy.
And this is the way it should be. Bipartite graph algorithms and topological
manifolds are not as important as Gardasil and alternative energy.

A substantial number of doctors doing useful research these days are,
surprise, Medical Doctors. If you want an eye opening experience, take a trip
over to the nearest medical library and spend some time going through the
journals. It will radically change your opinion of what science is and how
your field fits into it. _Discrete Math_ is a pretty cool journal, but it's
kind of embarrassing to hold it up to _The New England Journal of Medicine_.
Even _Annals of Math_ is, well, pretty irrelevant.

There's a long tradition of specialists taking myopic views of the world.
Computer Scientists think the world is one big computer
(<http://focus.aps.org/story/v9/st27>), chemists think life is one big
chemical reaction, stone-cutters think everything can be explained in terms of
stone-cutting ( _The Stone Diaries_ ). Rarely is that the whole truth. You
have to be careful to step back and take your own bias into account.

~~~
ComputerGuru
_Bipartite graph algorithms and topological manifolds are not as important as
Gardasil and alternative energy._

I highly disagree. Drop by any R&D lab at your closest university and see how
badly they depend on the latest software, the most efficient algorithms, and
other CS-derived "sciences."

If it weren't for languages like Matlab & the libraries of numerical methods
and algorithms, alternative energy R&D wouldn't exist. I was at the Nuclear
Engineering department of my university earlier today, and they're using CS
stuff we haven't even looked at yet!

CS is far more important in the grand scheme of things than it's being given
credit for, but we silly hackers are content to appreciate ourselves and not
look for more.

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tel
If you can manage the mind-numbing, 1990s flash interface, here's another
project that did a similar analysis:

<http://mapofscience.com/>

Their site shows a similar, higher resolution map of science and maps it to a
sphere. Pretty interesting.

Running a literature search, Richard Klavans and Kevin Boyack published papers
concerning science mapping between 2005-2006, so I imagine there was a good
chance they were inspired by eigenfactor.

~~~
apathy
Tamara Munzner was doing this with hyperbolic trees back in the mid-90s at
Stanford. I remember this because I always thought it was the most sensible
interface for big graphs.

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schtog
Perhaps computer science is the glue rather than the cutting edge? A lot of
research is not even realistically possible without computers.
Parallellisation is important for bioinformatics and so on.

But the really cool stuff that computers could potentially solve is incredibly
hard, like machine translation and computer vision.

But if the singularists are right computer science will solve the problem that
solves all other problems :) Or destroys us :(

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ph0rque
This article brings up an idea I had for a while: make a map of the sciences
(and eventually of all academic disciplines) with meaningful x and y axes. My
suggestion is practical vs. theoretical for one dimension, and hard vs. soft
for the other. Has this been done before?

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manvsmachine
Reminds me of something similar that was in Seed magazine a while ago:
[http://seedmagazine.com/news/2007/03/scientific_method_relat...](http://seedmagazine.com/news/2007/03/scientific_method_relationship.php)

