Neurososcience "evolved from an interdisciplinary specialty to a full fledged scholarly discipline"

Using new methods of analysis, researchers have tracked 10 years of neuroscience. One member of the team was quoted in a release.

"We wanted to map changes in science over the past decade. To do so, we started with more than 35 million citations between the articles in over 7000 scientific journals. This network of citations represents the flow of information between researchers in the world and the results show that significant changes have occurred in the life sciences. Neuroscience has gone from being an interdisciplinary research area to being a scientific discipline in its own right, ranking alongside physics, chemistry, economics, law, molecular biology and medicine," says Martin Rosvall, Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics, Umeå University. This analysis has resulted in some striking images (featured in the article), which elegantly demonstrate the change in the discipline over time.

Click to download the article "Mapping Change in Large Networks" (PLoS ONE).

Note (added January 29, 2010) - Here is the e-mail Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz sent me in response to this article (posted with permission):

Statistical researchers who specialize in the use of network mapping tools are generally careful to stress that a lot of value judgments about what is important can get hidden in these kinds of analyses  ... this paper REALLY shows that's true ... of course the media piece just parrots the scientific establishment's view that what this paper reports is all just wonderful ...

This paper clearly shows the obvious, that a big chunk of what was called molecular biology is now called neuroscience.  It also seems to claim the whole field of neurology has become neuroscience, which is a dubious claim.

"studying the citation pattern between about 7000 scientific journals over the past decade, we find that neuroscience has transformed from an interdisciplinary specialty to a mature and stand-alone discipline."

A lot of non-molecular biologists with a memory of what the NIH once represented think the days of interdisciplinary specialty were much better ... they were certainly more conducive to seeing human beings as intrinsically different from snails and fruit flies.