Non-academic Research Research Articles

Centering: Proposals for an Interdisciplinary Research Center

Governmental organizations funding science m several nations are creating large research centers that draw on several disciplines and that focus research on an area of immediate use to industrial concerns. I analyze eight proposals for a U.K. center devoted to human communication. I argue that the boundaries that such a center seeks to cross— between areas of knowledge, between disciplines, between academic and nonacademic research—are constructed in the proposals for strategic purposes m the immediate situations. The study supports other recent work on the crucial role of texts as interme diaries in the science policy processes, and on the need to recognize the unexpected contingencies and unintended consequences of textual circulation.

Structures and Strategies for Research in General Practice

Education of researchers: How is the career from student to senior researcher? Is it desirable to establish an education for researchers in general practice? The mutual understanding between academic and non-academic general practice research. Relations /understanding. Financing of general practice research: How do we get the funding? Attitude to private funding? How does general practice influence the funding policy? What is the background of our own national funding policy? The relations between political administrations and general practice: How do we communicate? How is our policy of publications influenced by these regards?

Comparison of Research Quality Guidelines in Academic and Nonacademic Environments

Only 2 medical schools in the United States and Canada of 133 that responded to a survey have policy guidelines that address most of the significant ethical and procedural issues related to misconduct and fraud in biomedical research. Some nonacademic research environments have superior guidelines that offer useful models and deserve examination. Prevention of misconduct and fraud in biomedical research and reporting requires thoughtful, proactive change by academic and clinical institutions. While the causes of misconduct and fraud may be sufficiently complex to engender long debate, the methods for minimizing it are relatively straightforward and start with a clear statement of values and acceptance of responsibility. Otherwise, the failure of the biomedical research community to meet this challenge forthrightly is soon likely to lead to damaging intervention by government agencies and elected officials. The time to act is now.

External Effects on Research Endeavors: Conceptual Framework and Empirical Examination

A resource dependence perspective is used to conceptualize and to investigate the consequences of externalfunding on scientific enterprise. We argue that the participation of scientists in collegial activities is constrained by resource relations and the resulting dependence of scientists on nonscientists. Constraining factors include secrecy regulations, nonscientists' lack of concern for scientific standards, and the diminished research time available to scientists. Researchers endeavor to protect their autonomy and reduce the dependence by establishing alternative sources offunds. The empirical analysis of the theory is based on a study conducted in Israel. Our theoretical expectations are confirmed for researchers operating in academic settings. They are not fully supported for non-academic research settings. The significance and theoretical implications of the results are discussed.

Abandoning the Research Bench

Sociological studies in R&D sites have explained the transition of researchers to administration using individual and/or intraorganizational perspectives. The phenomenon has been attributed to age, obsolescence, different socialization processes, and the conflict between professional researchers and the bureaucratic features of nonacademic organizations. This article reviews the individual and the structural level explanations of the phenomenon, and suggests an additional set of environmental accounts that consider the funding process. The hypothesis that the actual time devoted to research is influenced by these environmental factors is empirically tested in the context of the Israeli R&D endeavor. The results indicate that some administrative tasks are an integral part of research work, and imply that research and administration are not mutually exclusive activities but, rather, may be different functions of the same career pattern for nonacademic researchers. The article also suggests that the dual career ladder, a widely accepted organizational solution, is not a satisfactory remedy for researchers vulnerable to environmental pressures.

Dependency and Compliance in Academic Research Infrastructures

The article explores the process by which academic research settings become influenced by external funders upon whom they depend for vital resources. The emerging resource relations between university research and external funders give rise to an academic infrastructure that deviates from the traditional model of autonomy and freedom of science, and increasingly comes to resemble the context of nonacademic research settings. Based on data collected in Israel, it was found that externally funded academic research shows a low degree of autonomy, a high degree of structural formalization, and low influence of the scientific literature on problem-choice processes. External control affects the nature of the research product as well. Whereas the rate of published papers (articles) declines, the rate of unpublished papers (technical reports) increases with external funds. These observations suggest that the distinction between academic and nonacademic research settings is inappropriate for explaining the variance among different research infrastructures. Rather, the nature of the dependency situation accounts for their specific characteristics. The results have implications for the study of stratification in science and the growth of scientific and technological knowledge.

R&D career paths: Their relation to work goals and productivity

Organizational planning for technical personnel in large R&D units is often based on assumptions concerning the impact of age on their research productivity as well as shifts into administrative positions. In a study of nonacademic researchers in Israel, these relationships are used to identify persons proceeding along three possible career progressions: entering administration, remaining with research, and leaving the discipline. Comparing those on each path, administrators and veteran researchers show similar academic backgrounds. While mature researchers display a dual loyalty to organization and scientific community, the high productivity of these research stars can be said to have a strong influence on the success of a laboratory. The authors support the necessity for effective `dual ladder' structures, with those on each career line identified early on the basis of their work goals and productivity and given proper encouragement.

Scientific Specialties and Technical Systems

Recent arguments criticizing the concept of a scientific specialty point to the need for the inclusion of nonscientists and nonacademic research in studies of the research process. The notion of a `technical system' is introduced as a concept which addresses the embeddedness of contemporary science in a matrix of other institutions. Technical systems are centrally-administered networks of actors oriented to the solution of sets of related technological problems. They are characterized by relatively large size, cognitive complexity, sectoral diversity, occupational pluralism, and formal organization. Two systems in the energy field — nuclear waste research and solar photovoltaic development — are employed as empirical illustrations of the construct. Theoretical problems in the sociology of technical systems include the operation of multiple reward structures, the origins and effects of inter-organizational relations, and the role of the state in establishing and administering such enterprises.

Ionists in Industry: Physical Chemistry at General Electric, 1900-1915

W [HEN WILLIAM D. COOLIDGE came to Schenectady, N.Y., in 1905, he brought his with him. Coolidge was not an anarchist coming to blow up the main works of the General Electric Company; he was a physical chemist with a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Leipzig, coming to at the GE Research Laboratory. His bomb was a thick-walled, instrumented steel cylinder designed not to blow up, but to contain and measure high pressures and temperatures without exploding. He had used it at MIT in collaboration with his senior colleague Arthur A. Noyes to study the properties of solutions under extreme conditions. Bring your to our research laboratory in Schenectady, GE research director Willis R. Whitney had told Coolidge; we will let you spend one third of your time continuing pure research, while you spend the rest of your time helping us improve light bulbs. Things turned out differently. Coolidge spent all his time on light bulbs, and the gathered dust in a corner until he sent it back to MIT. He nearly went with it. I am fully satisfied, he wrote his mother in March 1906, that this is not so much to my taste as investigation in pure science in connection with some college.' Coolidge stayed in industry, and learned to like it. But as the story suggests, his entry was not smooth. This sense of the collision of academic and industrial values is missing from most historical surveys of early nonacademic research. Two recent review articles depict a smooth convergence of science and technology in the industrial research laboratory. Others speak of industrial research as work . . . placed under the direction of men who were purely scientific in their interests, or depict industrial laboratories as indistinguishable from their academic counterparts.2 Closer examinations of individual laboratories,

Environmental Biology Employment: Progress and Prospect

Graduate students in environmental biology are advised to examine opportunities in private sectors and nonacademic research centers. Personnel trained in both ecology and environmental science should have excellent administrative and research opportunities in areas such as impact assessment, resource management, systems analysis, and land-use planning. Curricular development, academic advising, and federal funding should reflect basic research and problem-solving research needs in the future. (Accepted for publication 8 March 1982)

The Doctoral Dissertation in the Biosciences

The Ph.D. degree is a prerequisite for advancement in academia and valued in most research settings. Although there is tremendous diversity in the characteristics of Ph.D. programs, they all require completion of an original piece of work, the doctoral dissertation. Its completion signals that the new Ph.D. is capable of conducting original, scholarly work. Traditionally, the doctoral dissertation has had two major functions: one scholarly and one educational. The former function stems from the commonly accepted notion that the dissertation makes a positive, original, and even significant contribution to knowledge in the discipline. The latter stems from the notion that the dissertation experience provides training in research and scholarly techniques that prepare the doctoral student for a career of productive research. With shrinking prospects for academic jobs in most disciplines (Braddock 1978), the traditional approach to training graduate students is being reexamined (Behnke 1977), and the importance of the dissertation to graduate education and a scientist's career, whether academic or not, is being challenged. Writing with specific reference to biologists, Reid (1978) presented five criticisms of the traditional dissertation: (1) It is not a useful tool in scientific communication; (2) it is a poor educational tool; (3) it places an undue burden on the doctoral student; (4) it is not evaluated by widely accepted standards; and (5) frequently, it generates no publications, even if it is of high quality. These concerns challenge the ability of the dissertation to perform the two traditional functions. In fact, Reid suggested that writing the dissertation might be dysfunctional for the student, since biologists tend to publish short journal articles and not extended monographs. Although he acknowledged that the dissertation frequently serves as an information source for later publication, Reid argued that writing the dissertation may place an undue burden on the graduate student and convey an incorrect impression of normal scholarly work in the field. These are academic concerns; the pertinence of the dissertation to nonacademic research careers is even more problematical. Because true experimental comparisons are not available, our approach to test these assertions was two-fold: We defined a sample of Ph.D.s who have had about a decade of post-Ph.D. experience to establish their career directions. We then gauged the effectiveness of their dissertations by the number of open literature publications generated and the rate of citations that those publications have accrued. Initial listings of the Ph.D.s' publications were compiled from Science Citation Index; these were revised by the respondents and categorized as to their relationship to the dissertation. Automated tabulation of citations to these publications was then performed by the Institute for Scientific Information. As for training effectiveness, we asked the Ph.D.s for their retrospective p rceptions of a number of dissertation feature . We also discussed doctoral training with a small sample of ABDs (persons who have completed all Ph.D. requirements except the dissertation before leaving graduate programs). These issues and others were addressed in a study of the role of the doctoral dissertation in career productivity, which examined a sample of doctorate holders in six scientific disciplines (Porter et al. 1981). The sample consisted of 1969-70 doctorates queried in spring, 1979. This paper focuses on data from the zoologists and biochemists included in the larger study. The other disciplines were physics, electrical engineering, psychology, and sociology. We conceive of the preparation of a doctoral level scientist as a process. The candidate's career aims and such features of a graduate program as research facilities and the rated quality of the department set the stage. The training process then leads to certain critical early career choices.