Sociology & Political Science: an intellectual genealogy in time
Y-axis = each author's first published year (1980 top → 2025 bottom). Mentor edges flow downward.
Bold purple edges are Wikipedia-verified advisor/student pairs.
★ Major mentors (≥25 descendants in the graph) have a thick black outline.
Click any node for lineage zoom; right sidebar summarizes each decade.
Method. Authors pulled from OpenAlex top-cited works in 87 sociology &
political science journals (1980–2025). Mentor→mentee edges 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 mentee 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.