Cognitive diversity and the future of crises: an analysis of the topic space of the biological sciences

This paper proposes to address the relationship between cognitive diversity and research topics among biologists. It asks whether biologists who are ‘open’ to a greater variety of topics are also more prompt to tackle issues relative to current global crises, or if some key topics like climate change, biodiversity and global health are confined to rather institutionally hermetic disciplinary landscapes. To answer this question, we propose to map a space of topics as a combination of latent topic modeling and multiple correspondence analysis. Such a method allows us to relate topics with proprieties of both journals and authors. It also provides an empirically informed framework to operationalize the cognitive diversity of biologists with reference to the distribution of their most prevalent vocabulary the space of topics. Sample for analysis is based on all publications (34,797) from all professors of biology in Switzerland between 2008 and 2020 (n=465).