Google Ngram has received a lot of attention in the blogs (e.g. here), but I haven’t seen a comparison of the social sciences yet, so here it is:
Why so little love for political science, especially in comparison with sociology?
PoliSciZurich
A blog by political scientists in Zurich
Apparently, diffusion is not everywhere.
Wrong graph. Here’s the right one:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=politics%2Ceconomics%2Csociology&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
This reflects more and more state of the art empirical political science – so, boom, here’s another graph:
http://tinyurl.com/24a5zo8
Pick the one you love most.
The colors are pretty hard to distinguish, but I thought you were missing a few:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=psychology,politics,political+science,economics,econometrics,criminology,sociology,anthropology&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
(I’m into political psychology, personally!)
This graph, from 1900 on, may be depressing:
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=neuroscience,political+science&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3
Political science mentions will soon be overtaken by mentions of a field that didn’t even have a name until 1970!