Cohesion in Demographic Research 1964-2011: How Disciplinarity Shapes Demography

Community detection in scientific networks has become an increasingly common strategy for evaluating how readily a scientific community is marked by division into uniquely identifiable segments (or communities). Demography is a field that draws from many academic disciplines and has internal explicit foci on different subjects, each of which could generate substantial segmentation of the field as a whole. We have little evidence of how integrative across those domains Demography is, or whether each comprises unique non-overlapping scientific communities. This paper uses a database of all papers published in four major general demography journals over several decades to examine the patterns of community segmentation within the field, to examine what are the primary drivers of the observed levels of network segmentation, and what researchers and/or research subjects serve as intermediaries between those identified communities.