Law in Structure of Academic Disciplines [Repost]

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This article offers a very interesting insight into the structure of academic disciplines. Using a variety of sources, the authors collected nearly 1 billion interactions from scholarly web portals including Thomson Scientific, Elsevier, JSTOR, etc.   

Residing between Economics, Sociology and International Studies, notice the location for legal studies in the upper center portion of this screen print.

The Full Size visualization as well as relevant analytics are  available within the paper.  Among other things, the approach undertaken by Johan Bollen, Herbert Van de Sompel, Aric Hagberg, Luis Bettencourt, Ryan Chute, Marko A. Rodriguez & Lyudmila Balakireva provides an alternative view of the current structure of the academic disciplines from that offered in existing bibliometric studies.

In the Meantime … Movie of Flight Patterns

Flights

So it has and will be light blogging while we finish a number of projects here in Ann Arbor.  There are a number interesting papers in the queue including The Development of Community Structure in the Supreme Court’s Network of Citations (with James Fowler, James Spriggs and Jon Zelner) and A Tale of Two Codes: An Empirical Analysis of The Jurisprudence of the United States Tax Court (1990-2008) (with Lilian V. Faulhaber). Both are forthcoming to the SSRN and the CLS BLOG in the coming days.  So in the mean time please enjoy the above movie ….  and we will do our best to provide content during this busy period…. 

HarambeeNet @ Duke Computer Science

We enjoyed today’s discussion at the Harambeenet Conference here in the Duke Computer Science Department.  The conference is centered upon network science and computer science education. It features lots of interdisciplinary scholarship and applications of computer science techniques in novel domains.

We are looking forward to an interesting final day of discussion and hope to participate in allied future conferences.  

YouTube Research — Robust Dynamic Classes Revealed by Measuring the Response Function of a Social System

YouTube Research

Here at the CSCS Lab, we are working hard to finish up some projects.  In the meantime, we wanted to highlight one of our favorite articles, an article we previously highlighted on the blog. Some of you might ask “what does this have to do with law or social science?” (1) We believe the taxonomy outlined in this article could potentially be applied to a wide set of social phenomena (2) As we say around here, if you are not reading outside your discipline, you are far less likely to be able to innovate within your discipline. So we suggest you consider downloading this paper….

Citation Analysis in Continental Jurisdictions

Citation Analysis

Anton Geist has posted Using Citation Analysis Techniques for Computer-Assisted Legal Research in Continental Jurisdictions to the SSRN.  While this is certainly longer than most papers, we believe it offers a good review of the broader information retrieval and law literature.  In addition, it offers some empirical insight into citation patterns within continental jurisdictions. The findings in this paper are similar to those shown in important papers by Thomas Smith in The Web of the Law and by David Post & Michael Eisen in How Long is the Coastline of Law? Thoughts on the Fractal Nature of Legal Systems. 

In our view, the next step for this research is to determine whether the pattern does indeed follow a power law distribution.  Specifically, there exists a Maximum Likelihood based test developed in the applied physics paper Power-law Distributions in Empirical Data by Aaron ClausetCosma Shalizi and Mark Newman which can help adjudicate whether the detected pattern represents a highly skewed distribution or is indeed a power law.

Either way, we are excited by this paper as we believe comparative research is absolutely critical to broader theory development.