Map of Science

[chera]

This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time: Maps of Scientific Research.  The researchers analyzed 1.6 million published papers in over 700 scientific disciplines and analyzed who cited what.  They did clustering analysis to find nodes (clusters of articles citing similar sources) and links between nodes (disciplines that cited work from other disciplines).  They also overlay quality of scientific work, patent generation, geographic, industry, and institutional information.  

This is a true masterpiece in massively dense interactive data visualization.  There are so many interesting tidbits of insight in this.  Of note: just four institutions - MIT, Harvard, NIH, and DOE, the US - cover nearly the entire map of scientific study.  For some reason, pharmaceutical research is highly connected while healthcare research is relatively isolated.  This is just way to fun.

[thatguy]

interesting. my brother went to MIT and is now working under the DOE.