Mapping genetic interactions is old hat, but now scientists are mapping science itself, and looked to see how it's been changing. According to the results of a mathematical model, neuroscience, for example, has only evolved into a mature scientific discipline, like molecular biology and medicine, in the last decade, according to the study published online today (January 28) in PLoS ONE.

A set of scientific fields that shows the major shifts in the last decade of science.
All journals that are clustered in the field of neuroscience in 2007
are colored to highlight the fusion and formation of neuroscience.
To see the full size image, click here.
Image: Figure 3 from PLoS ONE doi:10.1371,
Martin Rosvall and Carl T. Bergstrom

While scientists have developed tools for understanding the complexity of biological systems, mapping how these systems change over time has proven a much more difficult task. Specifically, without identifying the statistical noise in a data set, real trends can get lost and false trends can be fabricated.

Now, Martin Rosvall of Umeå University in Sweden and Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington present a new mathematical technique to tackle this problem. Rather than applying it to a biological system, though, they investigate a more meta-problem. Running more than 35 million citations of articles from over 7000 scientific journals through their model, they create a map of how science has changed over the last 10 years.

"This network of citations represents the flow of information between researchers in the world and the results show that significant changes have occurred in the life sciences," Rosvall said in a press release. Specifically, "neuroscience has gone from being an interdisciplinary research area to being a scientific discipline in its own right."

The researchers suggest that their technique could be used to map changes in other complex networks, from biological and social systems to air traffic and financial market patterns.


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