what do you get when you put 1,000 psychologists together in one journal?

I’m working on a TOP SEKKRIT* project involving large-scale data mining of the psychology literature. I don’t have anything to say about the TOP SEKKRIT* project just yet, but I will say that in the process of extracting certain information I needed in order to do certain things I won’t talk about, I ended up with certain kinds of data that are useful for certain other tangential analyses. Just for fun, I threw some co-authorship data from 2,000+ Psychological Science articles into the d3.js blender, and out popped an interactive network graph of all researchers who have published at least 2 papers in Psych Science in the last 10 years**. It looks like this:

coauthorship_graph

You can click on the image to take a closer (and interactive) look.

I don’t think this is very useful for anything right now, but if nothing else, it’s fun to drag Adam Galinsky around the screen and watch half of the field come along for the ride. There are plenty of other more interesting things one could do with this, though, and it’s also quite easy to generate the same graph for other journals, so I expect to have more to say about this later on.

 

* It’s not really TOP SEKKRIT at all–it just sounds more exciting that way.

** Or, more accurately, researchers who have co-authored at least 2 Psych Science papers with other researchers who meet the same criterion. Otherwise we’d have even more nodes in the graph, and as you can see, it’s already pretty messy.