As part of a larger project, I have built the network of scientific production in Chile. The source is Web of Science. From its dataset, I filtered out all documents in which at least one author is located in Chile. I got a total of 78000+ documents that have been published between 1909 and 2011. In the figure, each node represents a discipline and each link between to nodes means that there is one or more papers in the intersection of those disciplines. Also, the figure identifies broad categories of disciplines such as “Física” or “Geociencias”. The layout is made with the Force Atlas 2 algorithm implemented in Gephi.
For this visualization, I expected to observe the classical hair ball. But as you can see, there is an appendix to it. A closer look at those nodes in the appendix shows that it contains all social sciences. Indeed, an analysis of the evolving network (maybe I will produce a visualization later) shows that this appendix was originally disconnected with the core. In the future, the growing literature connecting mathematics & engineering with social sciences will move the appendix into the core. But, it seems that there is still a long way to go for that.
Finally, for those interested in exploring the visualization in more details, I have produced a version in sigma-js here.
