A team of scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Santa Fe Institute, led by Johan Bollen, have produced the world's first map of science from usage data. The map depicts the clickstreams that scientists leave behind when they search and retrieve information from online services. These new maps, published in the online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal PLoS ONE this week, show a compelling new picture of scientific activity and reveal the more informal links through which scientific knowledge is created.

Science and Technology are of tremendous societal importance and lie at the heart of economic growth. However, their social structure and dynamics are difficult to measure. To do this, Bollen and collaborators collected nearly 1 billion user requests worth of usage log data from some of the world's most significant publishers, aggregators and university systems. By calculating the probability that one article or journal is followed by another over hundreds of millions of user requests they were able to visualize the flow of online scientific activity.

The resulting maps of science highlight the prominent and central position of the humanities and social sciences that in many places act like interdisciplinary bridges. Because they are closer to real-time scientific activity, usage maps can also reveal new connections between scientific domains that may identify emerging conceptual or technical innovations as judged by the collective activity of the scientific community.

Bollen and colleagues are expanding the present work to generate models of how scientists search and retrieve online information and how that behavior shapes scientific innovation. These models will help funding agencies, policy makers and the public to make better decisions on the basis of more current data.

Citation:
"Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science."
Bollen J, Van de Sompel H, Hagberg A, Bettencourt L, Chute R, et al. (2009)
PLoS ONE 4(3): e4803. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004803 Click here to view article online

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