▲ See Neuroscience Grow ▼
Alex Holcombe pointed out a study1 which discusses the emergence of Neuroscience as the fifth largest field in the sciences.
I just like the picture. Neuroscience starts as wimpy orange, swallows timid blue, and becomes big, bold red.
In the same diagram, we also highlight the biggest structural change in scientific citation patterns over the past decade: the transformation of neuroscience from interdisciplinary specialty to a mature and stand-alone discipline, comparable to physics or chemistry, economics or law, molecular biology or medicine...
The transformation is underway. In 2005, neuroscience first emerges as an independent discipline (red). The journals from molecular biology split off completely from their former field and have merged with neurology and a subset of psychology into the significantly stand-alone field of neuroscience...
In their citation behavior, neuroscientists have finally cleaved from their traditional disciplines and united to form what is now the fifth largest field in the sciences (after molecular and cell biology, physics, chemistry, and medicine).
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Rosvall M, Bergstrom CT, 2010 Mapping Change in Large Networks. PLoS ONE 5(1): e8694. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008694 ↩








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