Social Networking Tools Applied to Scientific Topics: " 'Today, almost all of us access knowledge in ways vastly different from those used for hundreds of years,' Shiffrin said. 'The traditional method involved books, reference works and physical materials on library shelves, most of which had been verified for accuracy by one or another authority. Now, we sit at computers and cast our net into a sea of information, much of which is inaccurate or misleading.'

This explains why most of the authors turned to software to map scientific knowledge. Here is an example.

In , Mark Newman showed that clusters in social networks can also be used to map scientific communities. A scientist may or may not be six degrees from Kevin Bacon, but Newman showed that scientists were about six coauthors away from any other scientist."