Will the real Shas Kattan please stand up

Question

There is an old tradition commonly referenced in the yeshiva community that Masekhet Ketubot is the "Shas Kattan" of Talmud Bavli, that is, it contains ideas that connect to just about every other area of Shas (short for "Shisha Sidrei," all six orders of the Mishnah). The source and force of this idea is the subject of this question on Mi Yodeya.

Personally, I have thought that this doesn't really seem to be the case; although Ketubot does indeed have a lot of cases involving civil law and connects to many topics covered in tractates Bava Metzia, Bava Batra, and Shevu'ot, and one encounters the laws of Shabbat and Yom Tov in the first 10 pages, it doesn't contain much from Zera'im, Kodshim or Taharot (or Mo'ed really). There seem to me to be much better candidates for Shas Kattan, such as Pesachim or Nedarim, when one considers all six orders of the Mishnah.

My question is - and one that is worth a bounty of lots of extra points from me - would there be a way to computationally determine which tractate has the most varied connections to other tractates in Shas?

There are a few (valid) ways one might interpret this question, which could produce different results, but I'm happy to reward any good attempt with lots of bounty points. See below for some possible approaches. Additionally/alternatively, can you make (or reference) a visualization showing the Talmud's interconnectivity with something like a chord diagram? Or a similar kind of visualization that can help display what the "real Shas Kattan" would look like? (Sefaria has some nice visualizations here, but none that answer my specific question about the Talmud Bavli).

Computationally speaking, which tractate of Talmud Bavli is the real "Shas Kattan"?

---

Possible Approaches

Page-by-page Seder Score: give each page of talmud a score between 0-6 for its "order connectivity breadth," defined by the number of orders (out of the 6 orders, or sedarim of the Mishnah) cross-referenced by a single page, and then find the Tractate with the highest score averaged across its pages.

Simple Point-Per-Tractate Score: for each tractate, give one point for every other unique tractate (in Mishnah, Talmud, or Tosefta) referenced, with the possible highest score of 63. Perhaps it would be "more fair" to divide that score by the number of words in the given tractate.

Exponential Discounting of Repeated Tractate References: what I believe would be the most accurate reflection of 'shas-kattan-ness' would be to score each tractate's references as follows: give one point for every unique Tractate referenced. For the second time that tractate is referenced, give 0.5 points, then the third time, give 0.25, etc. (So, for example, if a tractate quotes Berakhot once and Shabbat thrice, it will have a score of 1 + 1.75 = 2.75). Again, perhaps divide the final score by number of words in the tractate for fairness

Answer 1

This question has inspired an article over at the Seforim blog, most of which is reproduced below.

---

Using Sefaria's list of links, we can do either a simple count of how many other tractates of Shas are quoted by each tractate. In this case, a 'citation' counts whether it is a reference to the Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud Yerushalmi, or Talmud Bavli to any one of the 63 tractates in Shas. According to this table, there is only a single tractate which manages to reference all the others: Chullin! This table also shows the results of a slightly more complex scoring method suggested in the question, where each additional citation garners incrementally smaller points in a geometric series.

Tractate	Unique Tractates Referenced	Exponential-Decrease-Score
Chullin	62	116.89577852011915
Eruvin	58	104.11961320040427
Menachot	58	104.1098582111299
Berakhot	56	101.77476863324046
Gittin	55	99.0613626539598
Bekhorot	55	95.35521305304428
Avodah Zarah	55	93.15401339507207
Bava Metzia	54	96.7636258301427
Pesachim	53	98.12823985467958
Niddah	52	91.59834762607352
Shabbat	51	93.73074903174845
Bava Batra	51	93.48292022838086
Bava Kamma	51	91.50913565878997
Chagigah	51	87.70597839355469
Kiddushin	50	90.7797232517002
Ketubot	48	86.27256274083626
Sukkah	47	84.69956454820817
Beitzah	47	79.6522365808487
Megillah	45	77.95748043013737
Arakhin	45	76.91127727914136
Sotah	45	76.47444889880535
Sanhedrin	44	83.24673657807102
Nazir	44	78.29042801260948
Makkot	44	75.13363409041631
Keritot	44	71.53747296286747
Nedarim	43	75.31631442904472
Shevuot	41	72.194636791005
Temurah	41	70.44600623844599
Rosh Hashanah	40	68.44915628246963
Moed Katan	37	63.7000732421875
Horayot	37	56.52581787109375
Yoma	36	71.1487001739068
Zevachim	36	70.46337077020688
Yevamot	36	69.9527091364871
Meilah	35	54.75389099120366
Taanit	33	57.51600646972656
Tamid	20	26.12499237060547

---

There is another possible way of interpreting "shas kattan"-ness, which would refer to how well balanced all of the citations are in terms of being a more fair representation of all of Shas. Although I don't think anyone had this in mind when referring to Kesubos as "Shas Kattan," it nevertheless seems like an interesting to me. In case this is interesting to anyone else, I'll show the results of my data here, but once again Chullin appears to be the winner (except maybe Bekhorot; both of them have very similar calculated deviations from an expected set of values of 1/6 citations to each Seder).

For a colorblind-friendly version, click here.

---

Another legitimate approach would be to understand the term "shas kattan" as a non-literal reference to "all the topics in the Torah," and ask the question: which tractate of Talmud Bavli covers the most unique topics? This question is much more difficult to answer simply because there were no tools which identified "topics" as they appear in the Talmud in the same way that people have been identifying talmudic cross-references since R. Nissim Gaon in the 11th century.

But today, we have Sefaria! Included in the Sefaira database and API docs is a way to identify which topics come up in any source, even though these tags are far from perfect. Here's a chart of all the tractates ordered by most topics identified according to Sefaria's topic links (along with the "Unique Tractates Referenced" number in the third column, as explained above)

Tractate	Topics Count	Unique Tractates Referenced
Shabbat	1133	51
Sanhedrin	1038	44
Berakhot	954	56
Pesachim	864	53
Bava Batra	781	51
Sotah	708	45
Bava Metzia	680	54
Ketubot	678	48
Eruvin	662	59
Yevamot	634	36
Kiddushin	630	50
Chullin	623	63
Gittin	616	55
Bava Kamma	611	51
Yoma	592	36
Avodah Zarah	577	55
Nedarim	541	43
Megillah	537	45
Taanit	488	33
Menachot	462	59
Chagigah	394	51
Rosh Hashanah	393	40
Niddah	384	52
Sukkah	351	47
Zevachim	313	36
Bekhorot	310	56
Moed Katan	293	37
Arakhin	289	45
Makkot	272	44
Nazir	251	44
Shevuot	242	41
Beitzah	217	47
Keritot	193	44
Horayot	183	37
Temurah	177	41
Meilah	104	35
Tamid	101	20

---

Here's a jupyter notebook with the code and figures, for anyone interested.