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Illustration of the processing of the citation-vectors with SVD, umap and hDBSCAN and the generation of Figure 2 and Figure 3. Graphic made with Adobe Illustrator.
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This paper presents an approach of unsupervised learning of clusters from a citation database, and applies it to a large corpus of articles in philosophy to give an account of the structure of the discipline. Following a list of journals from the PhilPapers-archive, 68152 records were downloaded from the Reuters Web Of Science-Database. Their citat...
Citations
... Per rispondere alle domande di cui alla precedente sezione abbiamo combinato due metodi: un questionario e un'analisi bibliometrica focalizzata su un corpus di riviste selezionato. Benché esistano diversi studi quantitativi che indagano la struttura della produzione filosofica tramite questionari (ad esempio, Bourget, Chalmers, 2014) o analisi bibliometriche (Ahlgren et al., 2015;Petrovich, Buonomo, 2018;Noichl, 2019), a nostra conoscenza questo è il primo studio a tentare un sincretismo dei due metodi. Essi svolgono due ruoli complementari: se il questionario ci permette di registrare e misurare l'opinione degli esperti, l'analisi bibliometrica consente di indagare quantitativamente i modelli di pubblicazione di filosofi e neuroscienziati e i flussi citazionali tra le rispettive riviste. ...
We offer a scientometric perspective on the relationship between Philosophy and Neuroscience. More specifically, based on bibliometric analysis and on a survey shared among philosophers with an interest in neuroscience, we tackle the following three questions: (a) What is the impact of Philosophy on Neuroscience – and vice versa – as reflected in citation patterns? And how did these citation patterns evolve over time? (b) Is the traditional distinction between Philosophy of Neuroscience and Neurophilosophy reflected in publication patterns? (c) Is the relationship between Philosophy of Neuroscience mediated by Psychology?
... Recently, however, they have been increasingly used to address questions relevant from the points of view of specific areas of academic research. Take philosophy -over the last couple of years, citation analysis tools have been used to address problems such as: the partition of philosophy into main areas of research (Noichl 2021); the visibility of philosophy of science in the sciences (Khelfaoui et al. 2021); the relative isolation of some areas of philosophy from non-philosophical literature (Chi and Conix 2022). ...
Two kinds of criticism can be raised against contemporary general jurisprudence -- the part of legal philosophy dealing with the most abstract questions about law. The more fundamental one claims that questions discussed by general jurisprudence might actually not be interesting for other scholars. The other one, while not denying the overall utility of general jurisprudence, suspects that, as currently practiced, it suffers from self-referentiality and lack of interest in other related discourses. In this article, I attempt to subject both claims to empirical scrutiny, using bibliometric tools. First, employing co-citation analysis, I identify the set of 169 central texts in general jurisprudence within the broader network of 713 core texts in (mostly Anglophone) legal philosophy. This provides ground for the analysis of citation flows, resulting in the following conclusions: General jurisprudence, when compared to other areas of legal philosophy, *is* distinctively self-referential, yet it still appears to spark *some* interest among other scholars, in legal philosophy and elsewhere.
... We downloaded the complete PubMed database and, after initial filtering (see Methods), were left with 20,687,150 papers with valid English abstracts, the majority of which (99.8%) were published in 1970-2021. Our goal was to generate a 2D embedding of the abstract texts to facilitate exploration of the data. ...
... uses node2vec (Grover and Leskovec, 2016) and UMAP to visualize 1.1 M texts based on their co-appearance in the US college syllabi. Similar approach was used by Noichl (2021) to visualize 68,000 articles on philosophy based on their reference lists. Here we based our embedding on the abstract texts alone, because citation information may not be easily available for all articles in the PubMed dataset. ...
The number of publications in biomedicine and life sciences has rapidly grown over the last decades, with over 1.5 million papers now published every year. This makes it difficult to keep track of new scientific works and to have an overview of the evolution of the field as a whole. Here we present a 2D atlas of the entire corpus of biomedical literature, and argue that it provides a unique and useful overview of the life sciences research. We base our atlas on the abstract texts of 21 million English articles from the PubMed database. To embed the abstracts into 2D, we use a large language model PubMedBERT, combined with t-SNE tailored to handle samples of our size. We use our atlas to study the emergence of the Covid-19 literature, the evolution of the neuroscience discipline, the uptake of machine learning, and the distribution of gender imbalance in academic authorship. Furthermore, we present an interactive web version of our atlas that allows easy exploration and will enable further insights and facilitate future research.
... As a result, we seem to have a good deal of information on the situation for authorship by gender in the US, but one might wonder whether the existing findings on author gender in philosophy journals is a problem belonging to the US and the Anglophone world. Some have speculated that the situation may be different elsewhere, especially in parts of the world more likely to engage with philosophies beyond the Analytic Tradition, such as Continental philosophy or Chinese philosophy (Klonschinski 2020;Klonschinski et al. 2021;Iliadi et al. 2018;Schwitzgebel et al. 2018;Noichl 2021;Chiesa and Galeotti 2018). ...
Using bibliographic metadata from 177 Philosophy Journals between 1950 and 2020, this article presents new data on the under- representation of women authors in philosophy journals across decades and across four different compounding factors. First, we examine how philosophy fits in comparison to other academic disciplines. Second, we consider how the regional academic context in which Philosophy Journals operate impacts on author gender proportions. Third, we consider how the regional specialization of a journal impacts on author gender proportions. Fourth, and perhaps most interestingly, we consider the impact of author ethnicity on gender representation, and we examine the breakdown of author ethnicity across Philosophy Journals between 1950 and 2020. To our knowledge, this is the first work to offer an estimate for author ethnicity and gender in philosophy publications using a large- scale data set. We find that women authors are underrepresented in Philosophy Journals across time, across disciplines, across the globe, and regardless of ethnicity.
... See Lean et al. (2021) for an account of how to bridge the gap between digital methods and practice-based philosophy of science. See, also, among others Malaterre and Chartier (2021);Noichl (2021); Malaterre et al. (2020); Herfeld and Doehne (2019); Böhm et al. (2022) for applications of computational methods in the philosophy of science. See also Sørensen and Johansen (2020) for a philosophical study of mathematical diagrams using machine-learning methods, whose outlook is particularly close to our present one. ...
A commonly held background assumption about the sciences is that they connect along borders characterized by ontological or explanatory relationships, usually given in the order of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and the social sciences. Interdisciplinary work, in this picture, arises in the connecting regions of adjacent disciplines. Philosophical research into interdisciplinary model transfer has increasingly complicated this picture by highlighting additional connections orthogonal to it. But most of these works have been done through case studies, which due to their strong focus struggle to provide foundations for claims about large-scale relations between multiple scientific disciplines. As a supplement, in this contribution, we propose to philosophers of science the use of modern science mapping techniques to trace connections between modeling techniques in large literature samples. We explain in detail how these techniques work, and apply them to a large, contemporary, and multidisciplinary data set (n=383.961 articles). Through the comparison of textual to mathematical representations, we suggest formulaic structures that are particularly common among different disciplines and produce first results indicating the general strength and commonality of such relationships.
... We do so on an academic corpus of research articles in the philosophy of science. Text-mining approaches have already been applied to broadly map the discipline of philosophy (Buckner et al., 2011), and so have SNA and citation analysis approaches (Noichl, 2021). SNA has also been applied to the more specialized field of the philosophy of science with a view to identifying its key journals (Wray, 2010), studying its relationship with the domain of the history of science (Weingart, 2015), and assessing its impact onto scientific publications (Khelfaoui et al., 2021). ...
Scientific networks are often investigated by means of citation analyses. Yet, interpretation of such networks in terms of semantic (and often disciplinary) content heavily depends on supplementary knowledge, notably about author research specialties. Similar situations arise more generally in many types of social networks whose semantic interpretation relies on supplementary information. Here, author community networks are inferred from a topic model which provides direct insights into the semantic specificities of the identified "hidden communities of interest" (HCoI). Using a philosophy of science corpus of full-text articles (N=16,917), we investigate its underlying communities by measuring topic profile correlations between authors. A diachronic perspective is built by modeling the research networks over different time-periods and mapping genealogical relationships between communities. The results show a marked increase in philosophy of science communities over time and trace the progressive appearance of the specialization areas that structure the field today.
... On the more general role of logic in philosophy, see(Bonino et al., 2020) for a quantitative corpusbased approach.(Noichl, 2019) provides an all-encompassing view of field of philosophy, also based on quantitative approaches. ...
Topic model is a well proven tool to investigate the semantic content of textual corpora. Yet corpora sometimes include texts in several languages, making it impossible to apply language-specific computational approaches over their entire content. This is the problem we encountered when setting to analyze a philosophy of science corpus spanning over eight decades and including original articles in Dutch, German and French, on top of a large majority of articles in English. To circumvent this multilingual problem, we use machine-translation tools to bulk translate non-English documents into English. Though largely imperfect, especially syntactically, these translations nevertheless provide correctly translated terms and preserve the semantic proximity of documents with respect to one another. To assess the quality of this translation step, we develop a “semantic topology preservation test” that relies on estimating the extent to which document-to-document distances have been preserved during translation. We then conduct an LDA topic-model analysis over the entire corpus of translated and English original texts, and compare it to a topic-model done over the English original texts only. We thereby identify the specific contribution of the translated texts. These studies reveal a more complete picture of main topics that can found in the philosophy of science literature, especially during the early days of the discipline when numerous articles were published in languages other than English.
... In addition to the topics already mentioned, this topical collection provides several examples of philosophical subdisciplines into which computer modeling has already penetrated. For example, there are contributions to computational modeling in normative political philosophy (Motchoulski, 2021), in the history of philosophy (Noichl, 2021), and an application in the philosophy of science that does not focus on scientific actors (Thorn 2020). ...
... The more philosophers engage with empirical data, the more useful they will be for computational modeling. In this vein, Noichl (2021) uses machine learning tools to analyze citation networks in philosophy to identify and describe clusters of philosophical subfields. Yet another novel computational approach uses modeling techniques from computer science for the purpose of conceptual explication. ...
... There are many ways to transfer concepts, model components, or methodological strategies between different fields of computational modeling, just as the practice of computational modeling has facilitated exchange and collaboration between different scientific disciplines. For example, while models in science might benefit from more frequent complementary use of simple models to facilitate understanding, as Walmsley (2020) argues, models in philosophy may benefit from incorporating techniques for high-level analysis of data (Noichl, 2021). ...
Computational modeling should play a central role in philosophy. In this introduction to our topical collection, we propose a small topology of computational modeling in philosophy in general, and show how the various contributions to our topical collection fit into this overall picture. On this basis, we describe some of the ways in which computational models from other disciplines have found their way into philosophy, and how the principles one found here still underlie current trends in the field. Moreover, we argue that philosophers contribute to computational modeling not only by building their own models, but also by thinking about the various applications of the method in philosophy and the sciences. In this context, we note that models in philosophy are usually simple, while models in the sciences are often more complex and empirically grounded. Bridging certain methodological gaps that arise from this discrepancy may prove to be challenging and fruitful for the further development of computational modeling in philosophy and beyond.
... Recently, it was used to produce an overall map of philosophy (Noichl, 2019) and to map the fields of history and philosophy of science (Weingart, 2015). When bibliographic coupling is applied, however, it is recommended not to use directly the raw number of shared references to compute the similarity among pairs of publications because papers with long reference lists tend to have more references in common with other publications compared to papers with shorter bibliographies. ...
The article investigates what happens when philosophy (of science) meets and begins to establish connections with two formal research methods such as game theory and network science. We use citation analysis to identify, among the articles published in Synthese and Philosophy of Science between 1985 and 2021, those that cite the specialistic literature in game theory and network science. Then, we investigate the structure of the two corpora thus identified by bibliographic coupling and divide them into clusters of related papers by automatic community detection. Lastly, we construct by the same bibliometric techniques a reference map of philosophy, on which we overlay our corpora to map the diffusion of game theory and network science in the various sub-areas of recent philosophy. Three main results derive from this study. (i) Philosophers are interested not only in using and investigating game theory as a formal method belonging to applied mathematics and sharing many relevant features with social choice theory, but also in considering its applications in more empirically oriented disciplines such as social psychology, cognitive science, or biology. (ii) Philosophers focus on networks in two research contexts and in two different ways: in the debate on causality and scientific explanation, they consider the results of network science; in social epistemology, they employ network science as a formal tool. (iii) In the reference map, logic—whose use in philosophy dates back to a much earlier period—is distributed in a more uniform way than recently encountered disciplines such as game theory and network science. We conclude by discussing some methodological limitations of our bibliometric approach, especially with reference to the problem of field delineation.
... Auditing firms and law enforcement need to sift through huge amounts of data to gather evidence of criminal activity, often involving communication networks and documents [93]. There are also analyses based on map-like visualisations of scientific publications in computer science [62], philosophy [143], and climate change research [25]. While these examples only utilise the textual information, VOSViewer provides an exploration interface for the underlying bibliometric networks [202]. ...
... They enable the user to visually explore a corpus in its entirety. There are several map-like visualisations for book corpora 1 [102] as well as philosophy [143] and physics literature 2 . These show the effectiveness of displaying individual documents in their global context, allowing the user to gain insights that would otherwise remain hidden. ...
Text collections, such as corpora of books, research articles, news, or business documents are an important resource for knowledge discovery. Exploring large document collections by hand is a cumbersome but necessary task to gain new insights and find relevant information. Our digitised society allows us to utilise algorithms to support the information seeking process, for example with the help of retrieval or recommender systems. However, these systems only provide selective views of the data and require some prior knowledge to issue meaningful queries and asses a system’s response. The advancements of machine learning allow us to reduce this gap and better assist the information seeking process. For example, instead of sighting countless business documents by hand, journalists and investigator scan employ natural language processing techniques, such as named entity recognition. Al-though this greatly improves the capabilities of a data exploration platform, the wealth of information is still overwhelming. An overview of the entirety of a dataset in the form of a two-dimensional map-like visualisation may help to circumvent this issue. Such overviews enable novel interaction paradigms for users, which are similar to the exploration of digital geographical maps. In particular, they can provide valuable context by indicating how apiece of information fits into the bigger picture.This thesis proposes algorithms that appropriately pre-process heterogeneous documents and compute the layout for datasets of all kinds. Traditionally, given high-dimensional semantic representations of the data, so-called dimensionality reduction algorithms are usedto compute a layout of the data on a two-dimensional canvas. In this thesis, we focus on text corpora and go beyond only projecting the inherent semantic structure itself. Therefore,we propose three dimensionality reduction approaches that incorporate additional information into the layout process: (1) a multi-objective dimensionality reduction algorithm to jointly visualise semantic information with inherent network information derived from the underlying data; (2) a comparison of initialisation strategies for different dimensionality reduction algorithms to generate a series of layouts for corpora that grow and evolve overtime; (3) and an algorithm that updates existing layouts by incorporating user feedback provided by pointwise drag-and-drop edits. This thesis also contains system prototypes to demonstrate the proposed technologies, including pre-processing and layout of the data and presentation in interactive user interfaces.
