NATURE 150 (2019)

The citation network of Nature magazine’s 150 years

In early 2019, Barabási got an unexpected request from the creative director of the venerable scientific journal Nature, asking if he could design the cover of the 150th-anniversary issue. Barabási’s work had been featured on Nature’s cover many times before, but always as an accompaniment to the publication of one of his papers. This request, a commission, was different. The BarabásiLab began the process with a data-driven analysis of the whole history of the journal. The team then mapped out the massive co-citation network connecting the 88,000 papers Nature had published since 1900. Two papers were linked if other scientific publications had cited them both. The visualization of the network reveals the highly multidisciplinary scope of the journal and illuminates how various disciplines, which appear in different colors, are co-cited. 

The original plan of a single cover image turned into a multimedia project consisting of a foldout cover of the co-citation network, and a three-page image illustrating the impact of several iconic Nature publications. The project was also accompanied by a video. While this map represents data specific to one journal, its bigger takeaways are about how discovery informs and alters our thinking, how ideas are born when disciplines collide, and how the knowledge that leads to the emergence of schools of thought is itself an enlightening and vibrant topic of inquiry. 

The exhibit features the final 5-page cover in a plexiglass holder and the final video telling the story of Nature’s 150 years through data shown on a separate screen. The rendering of the co-citation network projected on the wall offers slowly changing views of the co-citation network, the same network that appears in the large colorful light box. The large co-citation network in the black-and- white light box across them on the wall and the large citation “carrot” represent “process images”, generated during the research and production process, and are exhibited here for the first time.