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.
Comments 21
gasstationwithoutpumps — September 25, 2011
The graph is fairly meaningless without some idea of what the edge thicknesses mean. It would also be useful to have the self-edges on the same scale.
The graph does look fairly insular to me, with no connection between the social sciences and the hard sciences except that everyone uses statistics.
Missdisco — September 25, 2011
why doesn't art education connect with art? nor philosphy with literature?
Anonymous — September 25, 2011
No psychology?
rosel — September 25, 2011
surprisingly, there's no arrow between sociology and philosophy.
Christie Ward — September 25, 2011
Certainly, if you study the Viking Age, you will find yourself in multidisciplinary work.
The written accounts are in Old Norse and Latin, plus a lot of the useful scholarship is in German or Swedish, so you'll be busy in the Department of Languages.
To understand and interpret the written accounts, you'll need History not just of Scandinavia, but also Britain, the coastal areas of the Baltic, into Russia all the way down to Byzantium. And you may need to have some understanding of Law and Politics, in order to understand the mechanisms of the Viking Age legal system, as well as how and why Iceland formed as a republic, while elsewhere power was consolidated under kings. And don't forget Linguistics, the languages in Scandinavia changed considerably from 800 to 1100.
To sort fact from fiction, you'll have to turn to the work of the Archaeologists, and compare that to everything else you know and learn. You'll also lean on Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture, Art History, Sociology, Philosophy.
And don't dare overlook people who are actually reproducing some of the artifacts of the age, and their findings as to methods of production, raw material usage, patterns of trade that supply raw materials, the allocation of labor. These provide some really good insights in combination with the other disciplines above.
Really, everything is connected, and I think that's true in a lot of disciplines.
Anonymous — September 25, 2011
I have a couple of initial thoughts.
The data is from JSTOR. I know that in my field many of the more interesting, experimental, and interdisciplinary-inclined journals are not represented in the JSTOR database. It tends to have the old venerable journals, the heavyweights, which (for good or ill) tend to be conservative and move slowly. And the majority of scholars in a given field are not publishing in them.
Some fields, like classics (and I imagine many others, like medieval studies), are in and of themselves interdisciplinary, i.e., scholars studying literature, history, language, art, archaeology, political thought, philosophy, etc... fall within one dept and share the similar/same graduate training. Something to consider in analysis. (For example, just try to explain the lack of a link between philosophy and classics that doesn't exist in reality)
Also, in the humanities the book still reigns supreme in many disciplines. So measuring with articles is not the whole picture. I can think of several instances in which more interdisciplinary work appears in larger works, where there is more room to engage with other disciplines.
msvyvyan — September 25, 2011
This seems a bit odd - what on earth is the 'plant cell' on the lower right? And where are chemistry, physics - well, all of the sciences except 'Biology' and mathematics? Again, what do the size of the circles mean - size of discipline? I'll assume the arrows indicate the relative degree of information sharing.
This is a genuinely useless infographic, and one for which I'd like to see the sources and methodology, as I regard it as deeply suspect.
Delia — September 25, 2011
Oh, this is just too weird. My core anthro class did the exact same thing last semester, surveying all the department chairs about the number of research-related collaborations they had with other disciplines, as well as a number of questions relating to the how different disciplines might perceive interdisciplinary work.
And yeah, Classics really was just that isolated. Art, too.
As for the real "dead-end" outliers like Biblical Studies or Folklore... well, these are probably the result of simply being hard-to-find or nonexistent in many universities. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you just don't see all that many people walking around with majors in Biblical Studies or Folklore. Or even universities offering that list them as departments.
Tlock — September 25, 2011
This is garbage. My area of research is ancient Greek philosophy, and I'd say half of the people with tt jobs an anc. phil. in R1 universities have joint Ph.D.s in classics and philosophy (and almost EVERY philosophy department in the country has someone appointed with at least an AOC in ancient philosophy). Admittedly, there are some philosophy departments that are more connected to mathematics than say sociology or law, but this strikes me as someone's rather naval-gazing myopic view of the disciplines. Fail CHE.
Estella — September 26, 2011
And historians never ever cite classicists or vice versa? I find that implausible, but then again, I'm writing my thesis on classical references during the French Revolution, so perhaps I'm some kind of magical exception.
Gregório Tkotz — September 28, 2011
I didn't realy understand the meaning of the size of the circles, but this isn't what moust annoyed me. In my University, Anthropology, Political Science and Sociology are closely linked.
VinInTheChi — October 10, 2011
No engineering or computer science fields are shown to connect with math. Queen of the Sciences stripped of many of her loyal subjects and in a network topology map, this is heresy!!!
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