How Centrality Moved the “Wrong Way” into the Hard Sciences

Linton Freeman, a giant in Sociology whose research laid the foundation for much of modern network analysis, has stepped up to call-out Physics, Biology, and other hard sciences for their shameless co-opting of the most basic network analysis metrics–centrality. His article, “Going the Wrong Way on a One-Way Street: Centrality in Physics and Biology,” appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Social Structure.
People who study networks, and have followed the explosion of literature on the subject, are well aware of the migration of tools and ideas from the social sciences to other disciplines such as Physics and Biology. Freeman, however, is the first to articulate what many of us have been thinking for a long time, by presenting a history of centrality, and highlighting how it has moved the “wrong way” into the hard sciences. As Freeman points out, the social sciences have a often taken tools from physics and biology to investigate their problems, but in doing so have always giving proper respect and credit to the scientist that developed these tools. Conversely, as interest in networks has expanded, the hard sciences have taken these ideas and applied them to their research without giving proper consideration for their origins and related work already being developed inside the social sciences. In Freeman’s words:

The physicists were quick to extend the range of their interests to include other topics traditionally associated with research in social network analysis. And, for the most part, they continued to ignore earlier work by social network analysts. Three physicists, Barabasi, Albert and Jeong (1999), for example, published a paper in Physica A in which they examined the distribution of what network analysts had been calling “degree centrality.” But they talked only about “degree distributions” and made no mention of centrality. Apparently, they were unaware of related work by network analysts (e. g. Price, 1976).

In the end, the sharing of ideas between disciplines is one of the most fundamental aspects of science; however, when this is done with a blatant disregard for the work of others it constitutes a major violation of the tenets of knowledge building.
Photo: JoSS

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