The importance of Philosophy in the network of academic concepts = A filozófia jelentősége az akadémiai fogalmak hálózatában

Abstract

This paper explores the network of Wikipedia articles connected by hyperlinks, with the specific purpose to prove the external relevance of Philosophy for other academic disciplines. First, field-specific network properties of articles are examined with the help of linear regressions fitted to field membership dummy variables. Next, measures of cross-field contribution to academic knowledge are calculated for individual fields based on a previous study of citation tendencies of published articles in theoretical and applied sciences. For a more detailed picture of one-to-one connections between fields, adjacency matrices of the entire network, as well as its subsets based on broad fields are analysed. To extract the essence of information represented by the cross-field network, statistically significant edges are identified via the backbone extraction method, revealing a loosely connected structure. Finally, the same backbones are extracted for the projections of the indirect hyperlink networks, in which edges signify paths of a given length instead of direct edges between two nodes. With the assumption that the thorough understanding of a concept requires familiarity with the terminology and accumulated knowledge it builds on directly and indirectly, the current analysis demonstrates that Wikipedia articles in Philosophy are of central importance in the conceptual structure of academic knowledge.