Disconnected! The parallel streams of network literature in the natural and social sciences

During decades the study of networks has been divided between the efforts of social scientists and natural scientists, two groups of scholars who often do not see eye to eye. In this review I present an effort to mutually translate the work conducted by scholars from both of these academic fronts hoping to unify what has become a diverging body of literature. I argue that social and natural scientists fail to see eye to eye because they have diverging academic goals. Social scientists focus on explaining how context specific social and economic mechanisms drive the structure of networks and on how networks shape social and economic outcomes. By contrast, natural scientists focus primarily on modeling network characteristics that are independent of context, since their focus is to identify universal characteristics of systems instead of context specific mechanisms. In the following pages I discuss the differences between both of these literatures by summarizing the parallel theories advanced to explain link formation and the applications used by scholars in each field to justify the study of networks. I conclude by briefly reviewing the historical sources of these differences and by providing an outlook on how these two literatures may come closer together. Introduction: Why Networks? “Science must, over the next 50 years, learn to deal with these problems of organized complexity.”—Warren Weaver, 1948 In 1948 Warren Weaver, director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s division of natural sciences, published his now classic paper entitled Science and Complexity. In this paper, Weaver explained the three eras that for him defined the history of science. These were the era of simplicity, disorganized complexity, and organized complexity. In the eyes of Weaver--who was a