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gjmueller:

How Insular Are Academic Departments?

Academic disciplines sometimes seem isolated from each other. Like seems to speak to like. This, it is sometimes worried, may lead to stultifying agreement within fields. Meanwhile, each field solves the same problem in different ways, unbeknownst to the next.

It simply isn’t true, it turns out, that scholars don’t cite research in other fields. Nor do all fields have the same level of insularity. Illustrating this is the network map featured by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The connections between disciplines represent how often academic articles published by scholars in each field link to other fields.