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Because after four decades of mountainous publication, literary studies has reached a saturation point, the cascade of research having exhausted most of the subfields and overwhelmed the capacity of individuals to absorb the annual output. Who can read all of the 80 items of scholarship that are published on George Eliot each year? After 5,000 studies of Melville since 1960, what can the 5,001st say that will have anything but a microscopic audience of interested readers?
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One classic paper from 1991, for example, found that academic papers covered by the New York Times received more subsequent citations. Now, you might reasonably suggest a simple explanation: the journalists of the Times were good at spotting the most important work. But the researchers looking into this were lucky. They noticed the opportunity for a natural experiment when the printers – but not the journalists – of the Times went on strike.
The editorial staff continued to produce a "paper of record", which was laid down in the archives, but never printed, never distributed and never read. The scientific articles covered in these unprinted newspapers didn't see a subsequent uplift in citations. That is, if we can take a moment, a very clever piece of opportunistic research.
Intricate maps of science have been created from citation data to visualize the structure of scientific activity. However, most scientific publications are now accessed online. Scholarly web portals record detailed log data at a scale that exceeds the number of all existing citations combined. Such log data is recorded immediately upon publication and keeps track of the sequences of user requests (clickstreams) that are issued by a variety of users across many different domains. Given these advantages of log datasets over citation data, we investigate whether they can produce high-resolution, more current maps of science.
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To provide a visual frame of reference, we summarize the overall visual appearance of the map of science in Fig. 5 in terms of a wheel metaphor. The wheel's hub consists of a large inner cluster of tightly connected social sciences and humanities journals (white, yellow and gray). Domain classifications for the journals in this cluster include international studies, Asian studies, religion, music, architecture and design, classical studies, archeology, psychology, anthropology, education, philosophy, statistics, sociology, economics, and finance. The wheel's outer rim results from a myriad of connections in
between journals in the natural sciences (red, green, blue). In clockwise order, starting at 1PM, the rim contains physics, chemistry, biology, brain research, health care and clinical trials journals. Finally, the wheel's spokes are given by connections in
that point from journals in the central hub to the outer rim.
The connections between the journals in the map's rim cross multiple domains. For example, alternative energy (rim, 3PM) connects to pharmaceutical research and chemical engineering, which itself further connects to toxicology studies and biotechnology. Brain research (rim, 6PM) is connected to genetics, biology, animal behavior, and social and personality psychology. Human geography studies connects to geography, plant genetics, and finally agriculture. A number of clusters are well-connected to both the natural science and social science clusters. For example, ecology and biodiversity (5PM) connects the domains of biology (rim, 5PM) and architecture and design (hub, 5PM). Production and manufacturing (12PM) bridge the domains of physics and engineering (rim, 2PM) and economics (hub, 11PM).
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