The reinstrumentalization of theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM) in psychological publications: A citation context analysis

Kai Li

doi:10.1162/qss_a_00124

Abstract

AbstractResearch instruments play significant roles in the construction of scientific knowledge, even though we have only acquired very limited knowledge about their life cycles from quantitative studies. This paper aims to address this gap by quantitatively examining the citation contexts of an exemplary research instrument, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), in full-text psychological publications. We investigated the relationship between the citation contexts of the DSM and its status as a valid instrument being used and described by psychological researchers. We specifically focused on how this relationship has changed over the DSM’s citation histories, especially through the temporal framework of its versions. We found that a new version of the DSM is increasingly regarded as a valid instrument after its publication; this is reflected in various key citation contexts, such as the use of hedges, attention markers, and the verb profile in sentences where the DSM is cited. We call this process the reinstrumentalization of the DSM in the space of scientific publications. Our findings bridge an important gap between quantitative and qualitative science studies and shed light on an aspect of the social process of scientific instrument development that is not addressed by the current qualitative literature.

Highlights

Research instruments, are an important class of material objects involved in scientific research
This paper presents an analysis of the citation contexts of a classic research instrument in the scholarship of mental disorder, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM ), as a response to the concept of instrumentalization in the field of science and technology studies (STS)
We examined the five metadiscoursal resources proposed by Hyland (2005a) as well as verbs used in citation sentences from more than 100,000 full-text psychology research articles included in the Elsevier Text and Data Mining service

Summary

Introduction

Research instruments (i.e., objects that are instrumental to scientific works), are an important class of material objects involved in scientific research. Works by Bruno Latour and his colleagues (Latour, 1987; Latour & Woolgar, 1979) successfully established a materialist and practice-oriented tradition in science studies In this line of research, a frequently recurring theme is that the status of research instruments is contingent and dependent on specific research contexts in scientific laboratories that are both temporal and local. Two major arguments have been proposed: that there are highly blurry and fluid boundaries between research instruments and other types of research objects (Engeström, 1990; Rheinberger, 1997) and that scientific knowledge and instruments are always coproduced (Jasanoff, 2004). These ideas are well summarized by Clarke and Fujimura (1992), who famously stated that scientific instruments are constructed through stabilization of scientific knowledge: A knowledge object becomes a tool when it is “no longer questioned, examined, or viewed as problematic, but is taken for granted” (pp. 10–11)

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