The relationship between sociology and the other social sciences is in reality a relationship between sectors of different disciplines, not between whole disciplines. Sociology is one of the most open disciplines toward other disciplines. This openness is manifested in the citation patterns in academic publications, which allows one to measure the degree of coherence of a discipline, the relationship between specialties within a discipline, and the interactions among disciplines. If specialists in a subdiscipline tend to cite mostly or exclusively specialists in the same subdiscipline and if relatively few authors cite outside their subdiscipline, as a whole the discipline has a low degree of internal coherence. In this case, the real loci of research are the specialties. If, by contrast, a significant proportion of authors cross the borders of their specialties, the discipline as a whole can be considered an...