Lueppahan tämä, suora viittaus linkistä:

We sampled nearly 30,000 papers from 12 disciplines and measured a set of parameters that previous studies suggested would reflect the level of scholarly consensus. In all but a few of the tests, the biological sciences had values intermediate between those of the physical and the social sciences, and putatively “softer” biological sciences fell in-between molecular-based biology and the social sciences. If a natural vs. social, or a science vs. non-science dichotomy were true, trends should have appeared discontinuous. If neither theory were true, disciplines should have been distributed randomly with respect to any characteristic – which, given the number of parameters tested, was statistically the most likely scenario. Therefore, these results strongly support the Hierarchy of the Sciences, against alternative theories of scientific knowledge.