When I first approached this problem, I wanted to look at the field of Dental Anthropology, a sub-specialization of the many iterations of biological anthropology. I decided to look first at the common terms used in the abstracts and titles of the papers in dental anthropology to see if I could find any patterns.

Looking at the network analysis it appears that the red section relates most closely to age estimation using dental eruption, green is related to identifying human remains in forensic cases as well as forensic dentistry, blue is related to dental traits and morphology, and yellow seems to be a miscellaneous category including site descriptions and journal names. This analysis was interesting because there are so many words that refer to the same phenomenon, for example the ASUDAS section was counted separately from the Arizona State University Dental Anthropology System. Excluding some general terms like man, woman, etc. would likely have resulted in a clearer network.

I also wanted to look at the countries publishing works in dental anthropology and if co-authorship in the field transcended national borders which resulted in the following map.

The strongest connection in co-authorship was between the US and England which wasn’t surprising considering anthropology tends to be rooted in colonial empires. What was interesting was that the US and Germany were basically on top of each other, sharing a nearly identical co-author network which suggests a close knit group of academics regularly publishing together when viewed in a field this small.