Carl Bergstrom

With thousands of journals publishing papers every month, it can be tough for scientists to get a handle on research in their own field, let alone know where to go for constructive crossover.

SFI External Professor Carl Bergstrom, a biologist at the University of Washington, and colleagues are addressing that challenge by developing a way to visualize the big trends across the academic landscape.

Bergstrom and postdoc student Jevin West created the Eigenfactor, an indicator of a journal’s importance based on the sources of citations, but wanted to take it further by looking at relationships between major research branches.

In a Boston Globe piece highlighting a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bergstrom says their approach was to ask “What are the important structures here?”

Using the massive citation resources at repositories like JSTOR, they and a colleague are building a “Google Maps of scholarship” that shows how disciplines cross-pollinate and give rise to new fields of study.

"You need a way to get your bearings," Bergstrom says in the Chronicle article. "There should be a faster, easier way to help people get a big picture of a field so they can dive in."

Read the Boston Globe article (October 5, 2011)

Read the Chronicle of Higher Education article (September 11, 2011)

Read the PLOS One paper (January 27, 2010)