Conceptually, there is not much distance between diagraming the intellectual structure of an historical line of research and doing the same thing for the whole of contemporary science. If, as the DNA-history study showed (l), citation analysis can be used to define the intellectual relationships between past research events, there is no obvious reason why it cannot be used to do the same thing ...

It is not inappropriate to understand the modern and postmodern periods in the West as representing two moments of intellectual revolution. The modern era was spawned by an intellectual revolution that upset the assumptions of medieval philosophy just as postrnodernism in the contemporary period is founded on an intellectual outlook that challenges the assumptions of modern categories.' In this...

Quentin Skinner is an intellectual historian known for his pioneering work on early-modern European political thought. He was educated at Bedford School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Author of such works as The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978) and Visions of Politics (2002) he served as the Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, and currently as t...

Conceptually, there is not much distance between diagraming the intellectual structure of an historical line of research and doing the same thing for the whole of contemporary science. If, as the DNA-history study showed (l), citation analysis can be used to define the intellectual relationships between past research events, there is no obvious reason why it cannot be used to do the same thing ...

[Benjamin Elman is Professor of East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University. He specializes in late imperial Chinese intellectual history and in the history of science and education. His recent book is entitled On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 (Harvard University Press, 2005). Previously he has published A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China, ...