Notes

Science studies

"Communication is the only general scientific behavior; other behaviors are mostly specific and technical. Information and its representations are its principal and general artifacts" (31).

Social Process and Structure: Merton as Theorist

"The major ideas that related communication to social processes were Merton's....He explores the response of science as a social system subject to various historical stresses and thus suggests the ways in which the game evolves. Most important are those social processes and structures designed to protect awards for a most fragile prize, cognitive achievement and originality" (34).

Kuhn (36-7)
Modeling Science/Price (37-40)

Garvey & Griffith (42): "Students of science were at first surprised by G&G's (1971) findings that few people cared to read the published article when it finally appeared."

Treating the scientific journal as a newspaper vs. thinking of it as a registry of births. Citation, review, incorporation all subsequent to publication and as, if not more, important.

Specialties: Clusters of Ideas, People, and Documents
strong social organizations underlying scientific work (43)
co-citation methodology
"The discovery of a bibliographic, information structure that parallels social and intellectual structure was of major importance" (44). Allows combination of Kuhn and Price.

Thoughts

Another backgroundy piece that may not make it explicitly into what I'm doing. I'm conscious as I read essays like this of the differences between some of this bibliometric, social network stuff and what I'll eventually have to do in my own work. Fact is that there's a different model of knowledge production operating in the sciences than the one operating in humanities disciplines, and even simple stuff like the lack of significant collaboratively authored scholarship in the humanities limits some of the work that I might do.

The trail from Merton to Kuhn to more empirical work outlined here, though, is pretty interesting, and the level of detail accomplished in other fields as far as looking at this kind of stuff makes me humble.