Sociology, Political Science, Economics & Psychology: an intellectual genealogy in time
Hum
A scholar whose voice was already in the air while your own was being formed. Not a teacher in the formal sense — sometimes they died before you were born. Closer to academic inspiration than to advising.
Echo
A scholar in whose work your hum can still be heard. Not a formal student — just someone whose intellectual signal carries something of yours forward. Closer to intellectual descendant than to mentee.
The lineage edges in this map are softer than mentorship. They represent who reached whom, not who taught whom. Bright cyan threads are curated lineage; faint warm threads are co-authorship-inferred. ★ Loud hums (≥25 echoes) glow with a white halo.
Each author is a little sun: orange for sociology, yellow/gold for political science, cyan for economics. Y-axis = first published year (1900 top → 2026 bottom). Click any star to isolate that hum & its echoes.
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Method. Authors pulled from OpenAlex top-cited works in 87 sociology &
political-science, and (newly) economics journals (1900–2026). Hum → Echo threads combine
(a) Wikipedia-verified advisor/student pairs from the top-500 authors' bios (83 edges)
and (b) co-authorship asymmetry per Sinatra et al. 2016 Science: pairs
with ≥5-year first-publication gap, joint paper in the junior's early career window.
X-position via width-weighted DFS tree layout; wide subtrees would fold inward via
depth-dependent shrink (mechanism present, no tree wide enough in this data to trigger it).
Caveats. Co-authorship inference misses solo-published influence — Coleman,
Granovetter (own influence; he is a verified echo of Harrison White),
Bourdieu and Tilly's earlier work all have famous solo papers and so look sparser
here than their genealogical footprint suggests. CV mining in sociology/poli-sci
was probed but the genre rarely lists doctoral students in parseable form. Anglophone
journals only.