An analysis of the abstracts presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Neuroscience from 2001 to 2006

TL;DR

This study analyzed abstracts from the Society for Neuroscience meetings (2001-2006) using NLP and data visualization to reveal research trends, community structure, and demographic patterns in neuroscience.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, data-driven overview of neuroscience research dynamics, demographics, and community structure over six years, using advanced data processing techniques.

Findings

High geographical concentration in northeastern US

60% of authors appeared only once in six years

Growth in behavioral neuroscience, decline in cellular/molecular neuroscience

Abstract

We extracted and processed abstract data from the SFN annual meeting abstracts during the period 2001-2006, using techniques and software from natural language processing, database management, and data visualization and analysis. An important first step in the process was the application of data cleaning and disambiguation methods to construct a unified database, since the data were too noisy to be of full utility in the raw form initially available. The resulting co-author graph in 2006, for example, had 39,645 nodes (with an estimated 6% error rate in our disambiguation of similar author names) and 13,979 abstracts, with an average of 1.5 abstracts per author, 4.3 authors per abstract, and 5.96 collaborators per author (including all authors on shared abstracts). Recent work in related areas has focused on reputational indices such as highly cited papers or scientists and journal impact factors, and to a lesser extent on creating visual maps of the knowledge space. In contrast, there has been relatively less work on the demographics and community structure, the dynamics of the field over time to examine major research trends and the structure of the sources of research funding. In this paper we examined each of these areas in order to gain an objective overview of contemporary neuroscience. Some interesting findings include a high geographical concentration of neuroscience research in north eastern United States, a surprisingly large transient population (60% of the authors appear in only one out of the six studied years), the central role played by the study of neurodegenerative disorders in the neuroscience community structure, and an apparent growth of behavioral/systems neuroscience with a corresponding shrinkage of cellular/molecular neuroscience over the six year period.