Social Structure Of Science Research Articles

Genuine versus bogus scientific controversies: the case of statins.

Science progresses through debate and disagreement, and scientific controversies play a crucial role in the growth of scientific knowledge. However, not all controversies and disagreements are progressive in science. Sometimes, controversies can be pseudoscientific; in fact, bogus controversies, and what seem like genuine scientific disagreements, can be a distortion of science set up by non-scientific actors (e.g., interest groups). Bogus controversies are detrimental to science because they can hinder scientific progress and eventually bias science-based decisions. The first goal of this paper is to elucidate the distinction between bogus and genuine scientific controversies and provide a qualitative methodology, based on the literature on expertise, for distinguishing between the two. We will illustrate six epistemic criteria for distinguishing bogus from genuine scientific debates in science and medicine. This heuristic strategy applies directly to scientific reports, and it relies mostly on the social structure of science. We will then apply the above criteria to a case study: the controversy over statins, which are widely prescribed drugs for reducing the level of cholesterol and preventing cardiovascular disease.

Is Peer Review a Good Idea?

Prepublication peer review should be abolished. We consider the effects that such a change will have on the social structure of science, paying particular attention to the changed incentive structure and the likely effects on the behaviour of individual scientists. We evaluate these changes from the perspective of epistemic consequentialism. We find that where the effects of abolishing prepublication peer review can be evaluated with a reasonable level of confidence based on presently available evidence, they are either positive or neutral. We conclude that on present evidence abolishing peer review weakly dominates the status quo.

The Division of Replication Labor

Scientists are becoming increasingly aware of a “replicability crisis” in the behavioral, social, and biomedical sciences. Researchers have made progress identifying statistical and methodological causes of the crisis. However, the social structure of science is also to blame. In the fields affected by the crisis, nobody is explicitly responsible and rewarded for doing confirmation and replication work. This article makes the case for a social structural reform to address the problem. I argue that we need to establish a reward system that supports a dedicated group of confirmation researchers and formulate a proposal that would achieve this.

Invention through bricolage: epistemic engineering in scientific communities

It is widely recognised that knowledge accumulation is an important aspect of scientific communities. In this essay, drawing on a range of material from theoretical biology and behavioural science, I discuss a particular aspect of the intergenerational nature of human communities – “virtual collaboration” (Tomasello 1999) – and how it can lead to epistemic progress without any explicit intentional creativity (Henrich 2016). My aim in this paper is to make this work relevant to theorists working on the social structures of science so that these processes can be utilised and optimised in scientific communities.

Who Should Do Replication Labor?

Scientists, for the most part, want to get it right. However, the social structures that govern their work undermine that aim, and this leads to nonreplicable findings in many fields. Because the social structure of science is a decentralized system, it is difficult to intervene. In this article, I discuss how we might do so, focusing on self-corrective-labor schemes (i.e., ways of distributing replication efforts within the scientific community). First, I argue that we need to implement a scheme that makes replication work outcome independent, systematic, and sustainable. Second, I use these three criteria to evaluate extant proposals, which place the responsibility for replication on original researchers, consumers of their research, students, or many labs. Third, on the basis of a philosophical analysis of the reward system of science and the benefits of the division of cognitive labor, I propose a scheme that satisfies the criteria better: the professional scheme. This scheme has two main components. First, the scientific community is organized into two groups: discovery researchers, who produce new findings, and confirmation researchers, whose primary function is to do confirmation work (i.e., replication, reproduction, meta-analysis). Second, a distinct reward system is established for confirmation researchers so that their career advancement is separated from whether they obtain positive experimental results.

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures for Knowledge

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures for Knowledge

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures for Knowledge

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures for Knowledge

Co-Authorship Networks among DRDO Life Science Scientists

The modern scientific ecosphere increasingly involves collaborative research, wherein diverse talent pools fuse to produce a research output, and ‘co-authorship’ can be treated a quantifiable measure of scientific collaboration. The present initiative of a Life Science Journal catering to the needs of life-science/bio-medical science researchers offers a suitable occasion to investigate the existing social structure of science in the defence life science research establishment in India. This short communication describes a meta-analysis of co-authorship networks of this community and we find very interesting inter-disciplinary connections that highlight the significance of this new journal for research impact in the long term.

Outline of Synthesis of Cognitive and Socio-cultural Foundations of Scientific Knowledge Evolution in Research Programs of Western Philosophy of Science

The article analyses the development of cognitive sociology of science, in the object field of which connection of cognitive and social structures of science is traced. The role of context in scientific knowledge formation is defined. It is stated that the basis for development of research program of cognitive sociology of science appeared to be reconsideration of the standard concept of science as a complex of gnoseological, epistemological and methodological interpretations of nature and morphology of the produced scientific knowledge, methods for its explanation and scientificity ideals. The difference between «strong» and «weak» varieties of scientific knowledge evolution, developed in western philosophy of science, is considered. «Social studies of science» are reviewed as a form of social constructivism and relativism, exhibiting their specific nature in macro-analytical and micro- analytical strategies of scientific knowledge evolution analysis. The thesis that multidimensionality of science cannot be adequately interpreted focusing only on conceptual history of science is proved.

Examining Interpretive Studies of Science: A Meta-ethnography

AbstractThis paper aims to examine the interpretive studies of science. Meta-ethnography was employed along with some enhancement strategies supporting case collection, analysis, and synthesis. The study seeks to answer an overarching research question, What are the descriptions of scientific practice as portrayed by ethnographic studies of science? Three ethnographies of science were selected and analyzed. The results were organized along three elements: (1) overview of the ethnographic studies, (2) key descriptors, and (3) synthesis. It was found that the three interpretive studies of science had two converging themes: material culture and discursive activity. Each interpretive study revealed its distinct aspects of scientific practice. It was concluded that the material culture is the primary actant that shapes scientists' further activities, credibility and transformation of the community itself. The discursive activities inherent in scientific communities are a salient agency of doing scientific practice and the construction of scientific knowledge. Additionally, this paper highlights how the professional scientific laboratory is a system of literary inscription, the production of images, and reproduction of culture. This research into interpretive studies of science is to enrich our understanding of scientific practice and inform the potential audience to reconsider the practice of school science and its social structure.Keywords: Meta-ethnography * studies * Scientific practice * educationDifferent fields of study examine science and its enterprise differently. Philosophers develop philosophical understandings of science in regard to the justification, methodology, and content (Hoyningen-Huene, 2006; Knorr-Cetina, 2001; Sismondo, 2010), whereas historians draw attention to scientific content and theories, and the development of historical artifacts (e.g., instruments) and ideas (Knorr-Cetina, 1995; Vinck, 2010). History and philosophy of science enrich our understanding of science along with a focus on experiments, but not on laboratories, which are natural sites for knowledge generation (Guggenheim, 2012; Knorr-Cetina, 2001). Sociologists have been interested in exploring the whole process of knowledge generation, the social structure of science, and the norms of scientific practice. Ethnographic studies have been conducted in many science-laboratory contexts (Duschl, 2008; Knorr-Cetina, 1995; Vinck, 2010).Ethnographic studies in science are a means for further understanding the cultural portrait of professional science communities and examining the commonalities and differences of scientific practice that shed light on the common characteristics of scientific communities. In this paper, we draw on three exemplary ethnographic studies in the account of sociology of science: (1) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Latour & Woolgar, 1986), (2) Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Traweek, 1988), and (3) Art and Artifact in Science (Lynch, 1985). To guide our investigation, we pose the overarching research question, What are the descriptions of scientific practice as portrayed by ethnographic studies of science? To answer this question, we analytically examine and document the concepts the authors used to represent and interpret the scientific practice and knowledge generation process. Next we make a synthesis of our documentation of the concepts the authors used. This investigation allows us to narrow the gap between school and professional science practice. This gap emerged from the misrepresentations of scientific work, or the way scientists perform their inquiries to conceptualize natural phenomena and a lack of understanding of the various dimensions of scientific practice.Our purpose is not to criticize ethnographies of science within the context of any philosophical perspectives (e.g., relativism, realism, and logical positivism), but instead, to present the commonalities and differences among the three ethnographic studies, identify the distinct characteristics of scientific communities, and then portray a more holistic picture of how science is accomplished in order to translate them for use in understanding scientific practice in the science classroom. …

The Future of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

I examine the value and limitations of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In the interests of developing a social epistemology of science, I argue that we should draw on Kuhn’s later work, published in The Road since Structure. There, Kuhn draws attention to the important role that specialty formation plays in resolving crises in science, a topic he did not discuss in Structure. I argue that we need to develop a better understanding of specialty research communities. Kuhn’s later work provides a research agenda for those who want to study scientific specialization. I briefly discuss some recent studies that promise to provide valuable insight into the social structure of science.

The future of philosophy of science: introduction

Philosophy, perhaps more than any other academic discipline, likes to reflect upon itself. Thus, it is no surprise that philosophers regularly ask questions such as: What is the scope of philosophy, what are its important questions, and what are the proper methods to address them? Asking these questions also means to take stock and to enquire where the discipline is going. This is an especially worthwhile activity in contemporary philosophy of science as this field has been changing rapidly since its institutional consolidation in the 1950s. For present purposes we may very roughly, but still usefully, describe this change as having three phases. In the first phase, which lasted until the mid 1960s, philosophy of science was dominated by Logical Empiricism and formal approaches to philosophically analyzing science. The second phase began in the late 1960s and lasted until the second half of the 1980s. It brought the naturalistic turn, a critique of the Logical Empiricist’s picture of science as too far away from the actual practice of science, a focus on the history and the social structure of science, a shift from theories as the primary target of philosophical analysis to models and experimental practices, and many detailed case studies. While the Logical Empiricists gave us a grand general picture of science, the naturalists’ working assumption has been that aiming at such a picture underappreciates the complexity and diversity of real science. Moreover, the naturalists moved normative questions into the background. In the third

The African Eve Effect in Science

The Matthew and Matilda Effects in science were coined in 1968 (Robert K. Merton) and in 1993 (Margaret W. Rossiter) respectively, as tools to analyse the reward systems of science. By proposing the African Eve Effect in science as a third effect, the original scope for analysis of these systems is broadened from the social structure of science to the anthropological dimension of science. Similarly, the ‘psychosocial processes’ that were considered as affecting the reward systems (Merton, Science 159:56–63, 1968) are extended to include discursive practices. The African Eve Effect refers to the scientific notion of the ‘African Eve’ (or mitochondrial (mtDNA) Eve), a concept put forward by scientists to designate the genetic mother of all modern humans. Three discursive conventions constitute the African Eve Effect and together shape patterns of the distribution of recognition for scientific work: projecting imaginative geographies of otherness onto the frontiers of science; collecting, transporting and enframing material and ideas according to a Western epistemological order; and ‘evolutionising’ nature and the human in science. The objective of this paper is to specify and illustrate an experimental tool for analysing the entanglement of the reward system in science with culturally fashioned imaginaries and agendas.

Against representative agent methodology

Garnett and Boettke both seek to identify the appropriate behavior for the representative scientist. The social structure of science is better represented, however, with a heterogeneous agent model. Social epistemology and epistemological naturalism provide context for the argument against representative agent methodology. Asking whether individual scientists should “commit themselves to an approach and pursue it doggedly” or make “a professional commitment to intellectual tolerance, openness, and broad-mindedness” is like asking whether it is better to be a bouncer or a bookkeeper. The question depends on particulars that vary from person to person. Down with representative agent methodology. Up with diversity.

Redes de citación de las revistas españolas de Ciencias Sociales 1994-2006

The aim of this study is to make an analysis of the citation networks between the Spanish Social Science journals using the citations index IN-RECS. Different maps were generated representing the overall structure of Social Sciences and a specific analysis of Library and Information Science was conducted. The indicator betweeness was used as a measure of interdisciplinarity. The results reveal the existence of two main clusters, one formed by the Psychology and the Education and other with a prominent location of the Economics and the Political Science; Sociology is the main connexion between the two clusters. The journals with the highest rate of betweeness were Revista de Educacion and Papeles de Economia. The Library and Information Science appears in a marginal side of the different maps. Revista Espanola de Documentacion Cientifica is the most relevant journal with the largest betweeness rate due to its significant relationships with international journals. The results show that IN-RECS is a useful tool for the structural study of the Spanish Social Sciences.

Social structures of science and approaches to outcomes-based medical research

Recently, two seemingly divergent approaches have emerged in outcomes-based medical research. Proponents of evidence-based medicine (EBM) argue that the most effective treatments will be found by adopting a hierarchical approach that gives pre-eminence to randomized controlled clinical trials, where these are available. Proponents of participatory medical research argue that research undertaken with consumers and other partners in the community will produce the best outcomes. While one approach marginalizes consumer experience the other approach draws consumers into it. EBM assumes a high level of consensus in a scientific community, while participatory medical research relies on co-opting consumer experience. This paper indicates that each approach involves a particular view of social structure in science. The paper uses theories of social relations among scientists for the purpose of critically assessing EBM and the participatory model.

Science and technology development in the third world: Competing policy perspectives

A planned strategy of engagement, in order to benefit from, and contribute to Western science and technology, should be the major focus of science and technology policy in the Third World. What is needed is a strategy of vigorous and innovative engagement which will be based on an open approach to Western science and technology, a dynamic model of science development integration and institutional reforms for qualitative improvements in the social structure of science in the Third World.

シソーラスの概念関係に基づく社会科学分野の主題構造の分析

In this paper, a method how to define an inner structure of social sciences is proposed. Concepts and subjects of each scientific discipline are reflected in conceptual frameworks used for subject analysis such as classification schemes and thesauri. In the case of social sciences, Thematic List of Descriptors, a thesaurus of International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), provides interdisciplinary relationships by cross-references across the four separate enumerative classification schemes of economics, political science, sociology, and cultural anthropology. An analysis of the Thematic List enables us to understand mutual overlapping of the subjects in social sciences. Since each descriptor operates as cross-reference in the Thematic List, the number of descriptors indicates the degree of relationships between given disciplines at the conceptual level. As a result, sociology proved to be closely related to the other three disciplines, especially to anthropology; 2,338 descriptors out of all the 6,486 descriptors are doubly referred to sociology and anthropology. On the contrary, the discipline containing least overlapping descriptors was economics, the most independent discipline. Also, the paper presents the inner structure in which subject areas subordinated to the four disciplines are connected by the descriptor links.

The very structure of scientific research mitigates against developing products to help the environment, the poor, and the hungry

From the arguments I have presented, I hope it is clear that the distinction between basic and applied research is tenuous. Certain areas of research and methods may be favoured over others because of intrinsic biases, which are predictive of the type of application possible. Believing in the neutrality of pure knowledge is like wearing blinders: scientists need not be too concerned about the way in which the knowledge they generate is used. In my own case, this belief led to my participation in a system of agriculture to which I do not subscribe. Scientists should be willing to take responsibility for how they function in the system as a whole. Given the social structure of science, it is difficult for basic researchers to see their connections with the larger issues, much less to control them. Perhaps new ways of constructing knowledge-generating societies will be necessary in order to encourage individual responsibility.

Science and technology development in the third world: Competing policy perspectives

A planned strategy of engagement, in order to benefit from, and contribute to Western science and technology, should be the major focus of science and technology policy in the Third World. What is needed is a strategy of vigorous and innovative engagement which will be based on an open approach to Western science and technology, a dynamic model of science-development integration and institutional reforms for qualitative improvements in the social structure of science in the Third World.