Daniel Maliniak and Ryan Powers, Ph.D. students at UCSD and Wisconsin respectively, have an interesting website that uses network analysis to map the centrality of different IR scholars. Their research is based on citation counts of articles in the major political science journals, although they are expanding it to include other journals as well (see also the TRIP Survey of IR Faculty, which is soon-to-be updated).
They write:
Larger nodes represent articles that are more “central” (higher authority scores). Nodes are colored by their publication date. Bluer nodes are older. Redder nodes are newer. For the sake of clarity, we only display those articles cited at least 5 times. Co-authored pieces are identified only by first authors. Citation data are from the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge.
This visualization brings up some interesting questions, including:
- Does centrality imply authority, controversy, or agenda-setting? Higher citation counts may mean that more people are writing more articles that contest the cited source. It also may be the case that highly-cited articles set the agenda on a particular topic but left many important questions unanswered. On the other hand, it is certainly possible that one can be an agenda-setting, controversial authority all at the same time.
- Does centrality in articles correlate directly or inversely to centrality in books? There may be considerable variation between scholars who publish in peer-reviewed journals and scholars who publish books. For instance, some of the recurring scholars with a highly central nodes are Alexander Wendt and John Mearsheimer, both of whom have also written highly influential books. Robert Keohane, on the other hand, appears once or twice in the network with some relatively older citations, but he has written quite influential books, including one with Joseph Nye (who doesn’t appear in the article database as far as I can tell).
- Is the field becoming more specialized, or more integrated? The small blue (older) nodes are generally spread out, indicating that people used to cite each other less and presumably study very different topics. The red nodes, which are newer, seem to be concentrated in dense clouds surrounding particular articles (see the cluster of activities surrounding Russett 1993), or in figure-8-like patterns in which scholars are citing one another (see the Bernhard-Frieden-Broz connection in the upper-right-hand corner). This would imply increased specialization, which isn’t surprising given subfield and subject expertise, etc. But given calls to integrate across subject and subfield, is specialization a good or bad thing as the field moves forward?
These are just my initial impressions. Thanks to Brian J. Phillips for bringing this to my attention. Comments welcome.