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Representations of research fields are devices that are used to grasp the inner structure of disciplines.They play a crucial role in the disciplinary life since they ease the fulfillment of many epistemicand social tasks (from systematizing the intellectual content to organizing the cognitive labor ofresearchers, to manage appointments in the university). In the first part of the paper, I will distinguishbetween two types of field representations: top-down and bottom-up. The former are based on theassessment of the structure of research fields by experts, whereas the latter are based on computeralgorithms. In the second part of the paper, I will focus on these ones and, by taking as an exampleco-citation maps, I will argue that they capture the latent forces that shape the intellectual actionof the researchers contributing to a scientific discipline. These forces have both a negative andpositive function (i.e., they are structuration forces). The negative function is to constraint thepossible intellectual actions of the researchers, the positive is to enable the organized accumulation ofknowledge by channeling information and reducing noise.