Academic disciplines sometimes seem isolated from each other.  Like seems to speak to like.  This, it is sometimes worried, may lead to stultifying agreement within fields. Meanwhile, each field solves the same problem in different ways, unbeknownst to the next.

It simply isn’t true, it turns out, that scholars don’t cite research in other fields.  Nor do all fields have the same level of insularity.  Illustrating this is the network map below, featured by the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The connections between disciplines represent how often academic articles published by scholars in each field link to other fields.  The results are pretty interesting:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.