Mass Extinctions

There are five major mass extinctions. The most recent one killed dinosaurs. This is a fascinating area of research.

The research is still going strong. The following overview of a network of cited references unfolds chronologically from the left to the right.

The size of a node depicts how often it has been cited. The larger the size, the more citations it has picked up along the way.

The primary paths of the development become clearer when we focus on cluster dependencies with red arrows pointing to the references that presumably gave the citers good ideas. The word presumably here serves as a hedging device as we cannot rule out the possibilities of otherwise motivated citations.

The heat in the heatmap below indicates the citations received by an area. Two citation-heated areas standout: one on the left, an early cluster of references with a median of publication year of 1985, whereas the other one is on the far right, a latest cluster with a median of 2015. The two clusters are separated by 30 years, but as far as GPT-4-turbo is concerned, they have so much in common that they have the same cluster label - Causes of Mass Extinction. This is very thought-provoking: what has the research gone through between them? How do they differ despite that they are apparently trying to address the same profound questions?

Ultimately, the panoramic view of the various themes over the time span of several decades may provide an insightful backdrop for researchers to position themselves strategically and holistically.

This is a type of knowledge of knowledge creation and dissemination, i.e., meta-knowledge.