Academic genealogy to follow the evolution of materials research
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HISTORICAL NOTE
Academic genealogy to follow the evolution of materials research By Hortense Le Ferrand
G
enealogy and building family trees are popular pastimes that trace our ancestry through family history. But, establishing links and connections between individuals is also a research activity that interests philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science. Trees can be drawn to connect individuals not only by their family ties, but also by their publications and citations, disciplines and ideas, and PhDs and their mentors. This last category of family trees is known as academic genealogy. To build academic trees with less effort, crowd-sourced online platforms have been developed to collect researchers’ names, their masters’, PhD, or postdoctoral mentoring relationships, along with details such as PhD thesis title, date, and
university. One such website is academictree.org. It forms a database segmented into a total of 61 academic disciplines, such as neuroscience (Neurotree), physics (Physics Tree), chemistry (Chemistry Tree), and engineering (E-tree). When typing the name of an academic, it automatically builds their tree using the databases of all disciplines. Although the website was originally developed in the United States, it now covers academics from all continents and is growing every day thanks to input from users. An academic tree can be used to understand the various influences that may have shaped the current research of a person, to network using academic ties, or to look for an eminent ancestor. Conducting this exercise with scholars in the field of
materials science, it becomes apparent that the academic tree reflects the evolution of society in general. For example, the 19th century is largely dominated by scientists from Germany (the former Prussia), whereas in the 20th century, most people have at least one mentor in the United States. This is parallel with the massive immigration from Germany to the United States at the end of the 19th century. Furthermore, women are present mostly in the latest generation, as their roles continue to further increase in the materials field. What is also interesting is that since there is no material tree per se on the platform, the academic genealogies also reflect the evolution of materials science as a discipline through the ties between the trees and the topics of the PhD theses. In the 18th century, most academic ancestors of current materials scientists belonged Mathematics either to physics or chemistry, with little interconnectivity Metallurgy Mineralogy Pharmacology between those two fields. The Materials direct descendants generally as tools Geometry stayed in the same field, in Physics Chemistry the same country, and studied fundamental topics. Some Metals Ceramics Polymers examples of PhD theses from then include the study of the complexation of lead nitrate Nano-characterization 1950s methods Materials and potassium nitrate, and the Materials by design effects of radiation pressure on Industry needs Science spheres of arbitrary electric
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