Mapping the landscape of science

by the National Science Foundation

In ancient maps of the world, expanses of unknown territory might hold a warning to would-be explorers: Here there be monsters. For today's explorers seeking to navigate and understand the world of science, the monsters are the untamed collections of data that inhabit a largely uncharted landscape.

The April 6 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences features nearly 20 articles by some of tomorrow's mapmakers. Representing the computer, information and cognitive sciences, mathematics, geography, psychology and other fields, these researchers present attempts to create maps of science from the ever-growing and constantly evolving ocean of digital data.

"Science is specializing at high speed, which leads to increasing fragmentation and reinvention," said Katy Börner of Indiana University. "Maps of publication databases or other data sources can help show how scientists and scientific results are interconnected."

University students might use such maps to see how well a syllabus covers a field's major topics, while companies could map plans for targeting their investments. Funding agencies could keep an eye on research frontiers or forecast how funding decisions might affect a discipline. An online version could provide an effective interface to major databases.

"Today, almost all of us access knowledge in ways vastly different from those used for hundreds of years," said Richard Shiffrin of Indiana University. "The traditional method involved books, reference works and physical materials on library shelves, most of which had been verified for accuracy by one or another authority. Now, we sit at computers and cast our net into a sea of information, much of which is inaccurate or misleading."

"Creating a map for all of science will require large-scale cyberinfrastructure," Börner said. "The endeavor will involve terabytes of data - publications, patents, grants and other databases - scalable software and large amounts of number-crunching power. Such computational effort is common in physics or biology but not in the social sciences. However, maps of science will benefit every field."

(Complete text of this news release can be read here.)

The image above, created by Ketan Mane and Katy Borner, Indiana University, is a map of the top 50 "hot" words in the most highly cited Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences articles from 1982-2001. Words appearing more often have larger circles, while the circle color and ring color identify when the word first appeared and when its popularity peaked, respectively.