Online Technologies and Knowledge Production in the Natural Sciences

Abstract

Epistemic communities consist of structures and selectivities in citation and referencing that scientists as practical and economic reasoners use in order to establish scientific credit and capital in their specialized field. Knowledge then becomes a product of social and economic shaping based on selectivities, or decision-making processes in the epistemic community. This paper looks at the use of online resources (i.e., journal databases) in the natural sciences programs (i.e., physics, chemistry, and biology) of two Philippine universities, through key informant interviews with graduating students, thesis advisers, and library personnel. In this context, scientific credit and capital are gained by researchers from the credibility of the resources that they use (i.e., authors and research institutions cited in their thesis), although this is limited by the availability of resources in the universities. The availability of online materials is associated with functional meanings such as convenience. Meanwhile, the substantive meanings of the availability of online resources show the dilemma of universities in balancing costs and research independence, since findings show that the online usage in both universities is insufficient to maximize the costs spent in purchasing the online resources. The first university values knowledge production more than cost-efficiency in the acquisition of references, thus, the structure of knowledge production is more accommodating to the selectivities of its researchers. In contrast, it is seen that the structure of knowledge production in the second university regard costs as more important. This causes its researchers to use non-online materials.