Sunday, March 18, 2007

Science In Pictorial Form

I've just come across a cool image that encapsulates the level of interconnection within science. It even appears Astrophysics has some connections to other sciences, who would of thought. The full article can be found at Seed. The description is fairly interesting.
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. Links (curved black lines) were made between the paradigms that shared papers, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms nearer one another when a physical simulation forced every paradigm to repel every other; thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers; node proximity and darker links indicate how many papers are shared between two paradigms. Flowing labels list common words unique to each paradigm, large labels general areas of scientific inquiry.
Click on the picture for a very big version (< 5Mb).


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