• 2008
• Domain Map
• Exhibit map

This is the first map created from large-scale, world-wide scholarly usage data collected by the MESUR project from some of the world’s most significant publishers, aggregators, and large university consortia. It visualizes the collective flow of how information seekers move from one journal to another in their online navigation behavior.

This map is derived from usage data and therefore also reflects the actions of those who read the literature but rarely publish themselves. As a result, practitioner-driven domains are prominently featured.

The social sciences and humanities are much better connected to the natural sciences than expected. Most scientific domains, including the social science and humanities, are highly interdisciplinary, but the latter more so as shown by the concentration of connections in that part of the network.

Mathematics and physics are not strongly connected. Rather mathematics is part of a sub-cluster positioned in the social sciences and humanities that combines statistics, sociology and production research. Biology is strongly connected to the humanities and social sciences via ecology, bio-diversity and architecture. Practitioner-driven domains such as nursing and tourism are strongly manifested in this map because they are highly populated with non-publishing, non-citing scholars that nevertheless read the relevant literature in their domain.