This paper explores, by using suitable quantitative techniques, to what extent the intellectual proximity among scholarly journals is also a proximity in terms of social communities gathered around the journals. Three fields are considered: statistics, economics and information and library sciences. Co-citation networks (CC) represent the intellectual proximity among journals.The academic communities around the journals are represented by considering the networks of journals generated by authors writing in more than one journal (interlocking authorship: IA), and the networks generated by scholars sitting in the editorial board of more than one journal (interlocking editorship: IE). For comparing the whole structure of the networks, the dissimilarity matrices are considered. The CC, IE and IA networks appear to be correlated for the three fields. The strongest correlations is between CC and IA for the three fields. Lower and similar correlations are obtained for CC and IE, and for IE and IA. The CC, IE and IA networks are then partitioned in communities. Information and library sciences is the field where communities are more easily detectable, while the most difficult field is economics. The degrees of association among the detected communities show that they are not independent. For all the fields, the strongest association is between CC and IA networks; the minimum level of association is between IE and CC. Overall, these results indicate that the intellectual proximity is also a proximity among authors and among editors of the journals. Thus, the three maps of editorial power, intellectual proximity and authors communities tell similar stories.
In this paper we used a co-citation network analysis to quantify and illustrate the dynamic patterns of research in ecology and evolution over 40 years (1975-2014). We addressed questions about the historical patterns of development of these two fields. Have ecology and evolution always formed a coherent body of literature? What ideas have motivated research activity in subfields, and how long have these ideas attracted the attention of the scientific community? Contrary to what we expected, we did not observe any trend towards a stronger integration of ecology and evolution into one big cluster that would suggest the existence of a single community. Three main bodies of literature have stayed relatively stable over time: population/community ecology, evolutionary ecology, and population/quantitative genetics. Other fields disappeared, emerged or mutated over time. Besides, research organization has shifted from a taxon-oriented structure to a concept-oriented one over the years, with researchers working on the same topics but on different taxa showing more interactions.
Most philosophers of science do philosophy 'on' science. By contrast, others do philosophy 'in' science ('PinS'), that is, they use philosophical tools to address scientific problems and to provide scientifically useful proposals.Here, we consider the evidence in favour of a trend of this nature. We proceed in two stages. First, we identify relevant authors and articles empirically with bibliometric tools, given that PinS would be likely to infiltrate science and thus to be published in scientific journals ('intervention'), cited in scientific journals ('visibility') and sometimes recognized as a scientific result by scientists ('contribution'). We show that many central figures in philosophy of science have been involved in PinS, and that some philosophers have even 'specialized' in this practice. Second, we propose a conceptual definition of PinS as a process involving three conditions (raising a scientific problem, using philosophical tools to address it, and making a scientific proposal), and we ask whether the articles identified at the first stage fulfil all these conditions. We show that PinS is a distinctive, quantitatively substantial trend within philosophy of science, demonstrating the existence of a methodological continuity from science to philosophy of science.
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