Distributions | this thinking

This set of column charts represents how each term is distributed across 34 research disciplines.

For each term, the disciplines are ordered from that which refers to it the most, to the one that refers to it the least. That ordering is unique to each discipline (as illustrated here). Note, for example, how critical thinking falls away rapidly from its first discipline, compared to systems thinking. The data can be viewed with the proportions normalised for each term, showing how use of the term falls away after the first discipline. The non-normalised data shows the concentration of each term in each discipline (as a percentage of all the publications in that discipline). The raw document count shows the number of documents using that term in their full text over a recent five-year period (2020-2024). Critical thinking dominates those last two views, so selecting specific terms of interest permits better comparisons.

The column charts illustrate how widely used each term is across disciplines, but how about application areas, such as the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?

This heatmap represents the relative prevalence of each term in documents associated with the 17 SDGs.

This can be viewed to reveal which terms are most commonly used across the SDGs (e.g. critical thinking and systems thinking), or which SDGs are most often associated with the different terms (e.g. SDG 3 and SDG 4). The raw document counts show the number of documents using that term in their full text over a recent five-year period (2020-2024).

Having considered the distribution of the terms over disciplines and SDGs separately, we might ask a simple question: how are those distributions related?

This scatter plot (or bubble chart) represents the prevalence of each term and how concentrated or distributed those terms are.

For both disciplines and SDGs, each term's spread across multiple categories was measured by calculating a single measure of spread: 1-Gini. Lower numbers indicate concentration in only a few categories; higher numbers indicate a more even distribution across multiple categories. Note that systems thinking is quite evenly distributed across multiple disciplines and multiple SDGs (which can be confirmed by examining the first two plots on this page). In contrast, computational thinking is highly concentrated in a small number of disciplines and SDGs. To reduce clutter on the plot, it can be useful to filter out the terms that are of less interest, such as just viewing the top ten.

Having explored the distribution of the terms across different categories, why not examine the meanings they have, or their relative prevalence?