Search

Mathematics is often treated as different from other disciplines, since arguments in the field rely on deductive proof rather than empirical evidence as in the natural sciences. A mathematical paper can therefore, at least in principle, be replicated simply by reading it. While this distinction is sometimes taken as the basis to claim that the results in mathematics are therefore certain, mathematicians themselves know that the published literature contains many mistakes. Reading a proof is not easy, and checking whether an argument constitutes a proof is surprisingly difficult. This article uses peer review of submissions to mathematics journals as a site where referees are explicitly concerned with checking whether a paper is correct and therefore could be published. Drawing on 95 qualitative interviews with mathematics journal editors, as well as a collection of more than 100 referee reports and other correspondence from peer review processes, this article establishes that while mathematicians acknowledge that peer review does not guarantee correctness, they still value it. For mathematicians, peer review 'adds a bit of certainty', especially in contrast to papers only submitted to preprint servers such as arXiv. Furthermore, during peer review there can be disagreements not just regarding the importance of a result, but also whether a particular argument constitutes a proof or not (in particular, whether there are substantial gaps in the proof). Finally, the mathematical community is seen as important when it comes to accepting arguments as proofs and assigning certainty to results. Publishing an argument in a peer-reviewed journal is often only the first step in having a result accepted. Results get accepted if they stand the test of time and are used by other mathematicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marked by the killing of a senior ICT professional working for the Electoral Commission and the invalidation of the presidential election by the Supreme Court, the 2017 Kenyan elections make for a good case through which to study how digital technologies shape contemporary electoral practice. This article examines the practice of electoral transparency through technology and argues that it can be conceived as a socio-technical device based both on distancing people from knowledge of the electoral infrastructure and on staging a simplified discourse on public access to the electoral infrastructure. Drawing on interviews with key actors in election technology implementation and ethnographic observations of public events around it, the article argues that digital technology has had three sets of implications for elections. First, it has shaped the electoral infrastructure and the nature of the final result (now a paper and digital hybrid). Second, it has shaped the distribution of knowledge among electoral professionals, giving a central role to ICT actors, objects, and knowledge in the definition of electoral transparency. Third, the centrality of ICTs in elections and the order of knowledge they bring are highly controversial and criticized by other electoral actors who demand for material proof for understanding the inner workings of elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In high energy physics, scholarly papers circulate primarily through online preprint archives based on a centralized repository, arXiv, that physicists simply refer to as ‘the archive’. The archive is not just a tool for preservation and memory but also a space of flows where written objects are detected and their authors made available for scrutiny. In this article, I analyze the reading and publishing practices of two subsets of high energy physicists: theorists and experimentalists. In order to be recognized as legitimate and productive members of their community, they need to abide by the temporalities and authorial practices structured by the archive. Theorists live in a state of accelerated time that shapes their reading and publishing practices around precise cycles. Experimentalists turn to tactics that allow them to circumvent the slowed-down time and invisibility they experience as members of large collaborations. As digital platforms for the exchange of scholarly articles emerge in other fields, high energy physics could help shed light on general transformations of contemporary scholarly communication systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In scholarly debates, Ludwik Fleck's post-war paper 'Problemy naukoznawstwa [Problems of the Science of Science]', published in 1946, has been taken unanimously to illustrate the epistemology expounded in his monograph Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. The paper has also been seen to support parts of the received view of Fleck, notably that he manufactured an anti-typhus vaccine while imprisoned in Buchenwald. However, a different narrative emerges when comparing Fleck's paper with other accounts, also published in 1946 and written by other prisoners alluded to by Fleck in his paper. The situation is further complicated by four papers, published in prestigious scientific journals between 1942 and 1945, by the German medical leader of the typhus studies accounted for by Fleck. In addition, a thus-far neglected paper by Fleck, published in 1946 and summarizing his observations on typhus, discloses his role in the Buchenwald studies. Despite the obvious difficulties with tracing the history behind these works, notably the one on Nazi science, the contention is that what was attempted in Buchenwald in the name of science amounted to pseudoscience. This conclusion is amply supported not only by the accounts given by Fleck's fellow prisoners, but also by his own post-war paper on typhus. Based on the above findings, it is suggested that the mythology about Fleck, established in the 1980s, has been accomplished by a selective reading of his papers and also that the role played by Fleck was more complex than has so far been contemplated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents comments concerning Eva Hedfors' paper on Ludwik Fleck. It argues that Hedfors proposes an informed reading of Fleck which aims to contest the mythology of the latter. It explores the claim of Hedfors that the work of Fleck is poorly done, meaningless and of doubtful ethical value. It emphasizes that the views of Fleck on science is aimed at legitimating his own scientifically weak research. It examines the preface made by Hedfors to her thesis wherein she elaborates that when she first read Fleck, she found an interest in his writings.

The article focuses on the Science and Technology Studies (STS) community's view toward politics which is offered by philosopher Gerard de Vries. The author states that de Vries' general critique against most of science studies is that people are so busy renewing some feature of scientific practice that people took off the shelf whatever political theory they had. The author explains that science studies has made people realize that politics has always been issue-oriented. It notes that the paper of de Vries reminds that people have been good at tracing the constant innovations of science and technology but have been lazy in expecting that all those new matters will find a place inside the vast dome of already assembled democratic politics.

A set of 316 commentaries by authors of highly-cited papers was reviewed, to identify any difficulty encountered by the authors in producing or publishing their articles. The commentaries were selected from those published each week in the Citation Classic[SUPR] feature of Current Contents. According to their commentaries, a small proportion (5.7%) of the authors of these papers had some difficulty when doing the research, or when trying to publish the results. Three more highly-cited papers which had also encountered difficulties in getting published were identified from Citation Classic[SUPR] commentaries: one of them was co-authored by a Nobel Prize winner. Three of the papers which encountered publication problems are the most cited from their respective journals. In part, the problematic papers reported innovative methods or theories, or presented new interpretations of previous data. Those in the peer review system should have access to these findings, to improve their review of innovative work. Evaluative criteria that are too narrow can sometimes lead to the initial rejection of very important papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on sociologist Sergio Sismondo's paper on constructivism. Sismondo's paper puts into focus disagreements and differences in understanding between those who have been associated with constructivism and those who are not. In defining ontology as part of historical experience, constructivism makes a characteristic shift, it takes a philosophical question or concept and reconstructs it within the domain of empirical analysis and theory. Constructivism owns many questions to philosophy, a fact picked up very well in Sismomdo's paper. What is often less understood is that, for constructivist studies, what is important and what is not just the question, it is the shift. In other words, these studies display mentality towards philosophical concepts, and it is where they run to and how they reformulated the issue that account for their own interest. Sismondo misconstrues the thesis that the world is a consequence, rather than merely a precondition, of scientific accounts. This is the sense in which he makes it appear as if the material world were an automatic consequence of scientific knowledge.

Classical analyses of differences among the sciences has measured social but not cognitive structure. This paper suggests a method for describing differences among fields in the processes of knowledge growth. The method examines closely what is said about a particular scientific paper when it is cited in later works, and traces changes over time, if they occur. A comparative analysis of cases drawn from neuropharmacology and the sociology of science is used to illustrate the approach. The two papers analyzed shown strong differences in the level of generality at which the contents of the original papers are cited. Lack of change over time in how the sociology of science paper is cited is attributed to the lack of attention to its main empirical knowledge claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comprehensive collection of papers citing the works of a leading theoretical molecular spectroscopist has been analyzed. Citations were collected in the period 1937-75, and classified by the following criteria: (a) cited in a 'cover-all' review; (b) cited among others; (c) cited extensively or as argumentation; (d) cited with some reservation; (e) cited with criticism; and (f) extensively used for further development. Results indicate a constant citation frequency within the entire period studied. It seems that the effect of the increase of publication output in this field is just about compensated for by the decay of the citation frequency. Citations of type a are uniformly spread over all papers, with an average of one citation every ten years. The ratio of types a + b to types c + d + e + f is not inconsistent with a value of about 1:2 - that is, citations to this author reflect considerable real impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citation counts are central to many studies in the sociology of science. Due to cost considerations and the format of the Science Citation Index, researchers often collect citations only to a scientist's first-authored publications (so called 'straight counts'), rather than to complete counts based on all published papers. This paper examines the consequences of using straight counts to study the careers of a sample of PhD biochemists. It is found that even though these two measures are highly correlated, there is a significant chance of making substantive errors when straight counts are substituted for complete counts. The problem is found to be more severe when citations are the dependent variable rather than an independent variable. It is argued that our findings can be generalized to other fields where multiple authorship is common. Accordingly, extreme care must be used in interpreting results based on straight citation counts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Certain fields of research are deeply shaped by their proximity with policy-makers and administrations. The so-called 'regulatory sciences' and their corresponding expert communities emerge from this intermediary space between science and policy. Social studies of expertise and scientific experts show, however, that modes of engagement with policy-making vary greatly from one scientist to another. Two scientists that are part of the same research group or laboratory may engage the policy realm differently. How then does the social organization of research influence scientists' participation in scientific advice and the production of regulatory sciences? The paper looks at toxicology, a field in which knowledge production is centrally motivated by risk assessment, but one that has also seen the emergence of different knowledge-making motives, including advancement of fundamental knowledge and frontier research. A toxicology laboratory may thus harbor a diversity of moral economies of scientific advice. The paper argues that scientists' engagements with policy, through scientific advice and regulatory risk assessment, create organizational tensions and force changes to the standard, team-based social organization of research work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role of the materiality of computation in two domains: blockchain technologies and artificial intelligence (AI). Although historically designed as parallel computing accelerators for image rendering and videogames, graphics processing units (GPUs) have been instrumental in the explosion of both cryptoasset mining and machine learning models. The political economy associated with video games and Bitcoin and Ethereum mining provided a staggering growth in performance and energy efficiency and this, in turn, fostered a change in the epistemological understanding of AI: from rules-based or symbolic AI towards the matrix multiplications underpinning connectionism, machine learning and neural nets. Combining a material political economy of markets with a material epistemology of science, the article shows that there is no clear-cut division between software and hardware, between instructions and tools, and between frameworks of thought and the material and economic conditions of possibility of thought itself. As the microchip shortage and the growing geopolitical relevance of the hardware and semiconductor supply chain come to the fore, the paper invites social scientists to engage more closely with the materialities and hardware architectures of 'virtual' algorithms and software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does collaboration improve the quality of scientific research? Editorial decision on papers submitted to a leading social psychology journal was cross-classified by number of authors. A small relationship in the predicted direction was obtained and it persisted in the face of two relevant controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article articulates a theory of citing behavior, which might both illuminate the currently available empirical findings on characteristics of references in scientific papers and perhaps indicate interesting but previously unexamined aspects of citation. Current studies can be divided into three groups according to the different ways they have employed citation data. Some studies have used the number of citations as an indication of its scientific quality, significance or worth. Likewise, the number of citations obtained by an author has been used to measure the impact of his or her work on the scientific community. In other studies, citation patterns have been employed to derive maps of the structure of scientific specialties and disciplines. The third approach can be seen in two recent attempts to construct typologies of different varieties of reference and citations by content analysis. Various studies have made some interesting contributions to the understanding of science and scientific activity. Nevertheless, their achievements have been obtained without the aid of an explicit and accepted theory concerning reasons why scientists normally cite other papers, and why authors choose to cite particular papers rather than others.

In this paper, I investigate the co-production of genetic research and national politics in post-martial law Taiwan. This entails analyzing two co-produced phenomena: the nationalization of biomedicine—in which the national discourse over racial/ethnic categories and ancestral origin increasingly shapes scientists' biomedical research; and the biomedicalization of the nation—in which people in public discourse increasingly use biomedical categories in characterizing national differences and identities. I analyze how the production and representation of scientific knowledge of the ancestral origins and genetic make-up of Taiwan have been embedded in Taiwanese politics. This includes the emergence of a new categorization into four great ethnic groups, multiculturalism, and the assertion of a distinct Taiwanese national identity, particularly in response to the People's Republic of China's claims of common ancestry. I also examine how the scientific findings produced in the lab have spilled out into both Taiwan and China through journals, media, history textbooks, and public disputes since the 1990s and brought about significant social impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A mathematical model is introduced which describes citing as a probabilistic process, while taking into account that in general the probability for a paper to be cited decreases with age. With the aid of the model it is possible to ascertain what differences in numbers of citations are to be considered statistically significant (i.e. not due to mere chance). Significant differences are supposed to reflect differences in 'impact' (i.e. differences in the overall judgement of the paper by the scientific community). The 'impact' of a paper is thought not only to be determined by its scientific significance, but also by such extrinsic factors as locale of the author, prestige of the journal in which the paper is published, and so on. A parameter is also introduced which measures the decay rate of citations. This parameter may be useful in making quantitative comparisons between the 'dynamics' of various scientific specialties. Finally, indices are proposed to measure the dissemination of scientific work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a taxonomy of errors in the scientific literature and an account of how the errors are distributed over the categories. We have developed the taxonomy by studying substantial errors in the scientific literature as described in retraction notices published in the journal Science over the past 35 years. We then examine how the sorts of errors that lead to retracted papers can be prevented and detected, considering the perspective of collaborating scientists, journal editors and referees, and readers of the published articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers interested in the structure of scientific fields have documented increases in specialization and collaboration. How, if at all, are these two trends related? Is specialization so severe that scholars cannot collaborate unless they share specific research interests? Or, have specializing tendencies promoted research that joins specialty areas and broaches new topics? We answer these important questions for a single discipline, sociology, using both qualitative interviews and latent profile analysis. We empirically identify three collaborative styles that depend on both the areas and extent of specialization in coauthors' research programs. The prominence of the reinforcing generalist profile suggests that specialization in science mainly serves to encourage scholars to work with others in their specialty area. However, the existence of two other styles - a more complementary one and one that is characterized by migration into new intellectual terrain - suggests that subfields within sociology are permeable enough to permit boundary-spanning, original research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is objectivity accomplished in laboratory economic experiments? To address this question, this paper focuses on a modest and mundane thing: the written instructions that guide experimental subjects in the lab. In a material-semiotic perspective, these instructions can be understood as text-devices. We follow text-devices 'on the move' from their very writing, through the lab, the review process and out into the journal article. To do so, we analyse 'text-author ensembles', which are journal articles together with practice-oriented interviews with their authors. We show that instructions act not simply as texts, but as experimental instruments that also perform the procedure of experimental economics. They draw together the procedural, material and rhetorical dimensions of experimental work in economics, and link the lab setting to collective validation procedures within the discipline of economics. To achieve this, experimental economists rely on qualitative writing skills refined in collective writing and reviewing practices. These text-devices 'on the move' alert us not only to the role of writing and writing skills in the production of scientific knowledge, but to the role of texts as material and semiotic objects that can produce facts as well as labs and disciplines, and that are key to the accomplishment of objectivity in experimental economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps because there is no precise definition of scientific originality, studies of peer review in scientific journals have shown that reviews can be arbitrary or ineffective. In this Note, a potential reference point in evaluating originality that may be useful in analyzing the problem is presented and tested - a typology of scientific originality based on a structural analysis of the scientific paper. As reported in a paper, each of three elements of scientific work (hypothesis, methods and results) either has been previously reported in the scientific literature, or is newly reported. Scientific originality can then be defined as a permutation of new and old information: eight types of originality, ranging from all three elements being previously reported, to all elements being new. To determine if the typology has face validity, highly experienced scientists were asked by mail survey to use the typology in two exercises: rating the eight originality types, and assigning an originality type to highly-cited articles the scientists had written. Of 301 scientists, 206 (68%) responded: between them, they had authored a total of 230 articles. The eight originality types were rated by 84% of the scientists, and an originality type was assigned to 209 of the 230 articles: the most frequent type was new hypothesis/previously-reported methods/new results. To see if scientific journals might vary in the type of originality they prefer, the articles were divided into two equal groups, by the age of the journals publishing them: younger (0-29 years, n = 106) or older (30-185 years, n = 103). The distribution of originality types was virtually identical for the two groups. The results of this study indicate that the typology merits further study as a means of investigating or evaluating scientific originality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different audiences at different distances from the core-set read scientific papers in different ways. If the institutional circumstances are right, an ‘inner audience’ may try to control an outer audience's reading. In physics, the literature is sufficiently open to allow some papers that have no credibility with the mainstream to be published. This normally causes no problem within ‘core-groups’ of scientists, because the orthodox interpretation is widely understood. There can still be trouble, however, from those who have not been socialized into the core-group's interpretative framework. Strangers to the field may give credence to papers which the core-group considers to be interpretatively dead. The ‘strangers’ to which I refer are not scientific antagonists but scientists in different specialisms to those in the core-group, as well as policymakers and funders. A problem arises for the core-group when non-core-groupers are drawn into important decisions - as when a Big Science is fighting for funds. The case of heterodox publications in gravitational radiation is examined. It is shown that papers published between 1985 and 1995, of which the core-group could normally be expected to think, ‘Ho hum - more of this’, were strongly attacked. The institutional background of these attacks is explained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on fieldwork in the Committee on Publication Ethics, this paper offers an analysis of the forms of doings that publication ethics in action can take during what is called the 'Forum', a space where allegations of dubious research conduct get aired and debated between editors and publishers. This article examines recurring motifs within the review of publication practices whose ethics are called into. These motifs include: the shaping of publication ethics as an expertise that can be standardized across locations and disciplines, the separation of the research record from relations that produce it, and the divisibility of the scientific paper. Together these institute an ethics of repair at the centre of the curative enterprise of the Committee on Publication Ethics. Under the language of correcting the literature the members are working out, along with authors, what the research record should be and, inevitably, what it is. In turn, this article elicits new analytical objects that re-describe publication ethics as a form of expertise, beyond (and despite) the rehearsed axioms of this now well-established professional field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's reply to comments launched at her paper on Ludwik Fleck. She clarifies certain issues and corrects possible misreadings concerning her claim that Fleck became a willing and eager participant in Ding's murderous enterprise and was volitionally involved in Nazi medical experiments. She reacts on her alleged proposal that Fleck admits in his paper that he was involved in Ding's experiments. The author opposes the allegations that she had seen a proof of Fleck's active participation in Ding's experiments.

The discovery of high-temperature superconductivity (HTS) was a momentous event. This article explores the social and institutional history of HTS research in China between 1987 and 2008. Desire for a Nobel Prize shaped the Chinese state's initial push to establish the National Superconductivity Research Program. Yet, after the enthusiasm for HTS research cooled, and even after a Nobel Prize for HTS was awarded to non-Chinese scientists, financial and institutional support for the research continued. This process fostered the 'to live' ethos of science, which has replaced the Nobel Prize dream as a central mechanism of interaction between the state and science in China. Indeed, Chinese HTS research not only survived, but also produced an abundance of 'normal science' discoveries. This pattern continued after 2008, when Japanese scientists made the groundbreaking innovation of iron-based superconductivity and Chinese scientists quickly turned their attention to this sub-field. They published many papers pushing the field forward slightly, rather than making the largest scientific advances. The mutual interaction between the state and scientists underpinned this phenomenon: On the one hand, the productivity of normal science has helped to maintain state legitimacy. On the other hand, the evaluation and incentive systems, as well as deep-rooted cultural features such as officialism, utilitarianism, and the foregrounding of politics lead scientists to opportunistically pursue normal science. The state and scientists have co-produced a regime of normal science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bibliometric methodology of citation tabulation is applied to the problem of identifying highly cited Soviet scientific areas. A general lack of highly cited Soviet papers is apparent. A further indication of the isolation of Soviet science is the existence of two discrete sets of highly cited Soviet papers, one set published in Soviet journals and cited by Soviet scientists, and a second set published in international journals and cited by non-Soviet scientists. The lists of highly cited papers were reviewed by experts in the field. The consensus was that these lists were indicative of areas of strong Soviet research and that lists of institutions producing these papers include the important Soviet labs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few years, considerable interest has been paid to the way in which social expectations (hopes, hypes, fears) about new genomic technologies help shape, and in themselves are shaped by, emerging technologies, regulatory regimes and social concerns. In comparison, little attention has been paid to the role of expectations in related, but non-scientific discourses, such as bioethics. Drawing on a review of publications addressing the ethical issues associated with pharmacogenetics, this paper presents a detailed critique of bioethicists' contribution to these debates. The review highlights how, almost a decade after bioethical debate around pharmacogenetics started, and in contrast to the profession's self-perception as a form of regulator, bioethicists still largely restrict themselves to reviews of possible ethical issues raised by this technology, rather than critiquing others' positions and arguing for specific points of view. In addition the paper argues that bioethicists tend to: accept unquestioningly scientists' expectations about the development and ethical issues raised by pharmacogenetics; ignore contributions from bioethicists who do question these expectations; and engage in an ethical debate, the boundaries of which have been laid down and defined by academic and industry scientists. The paper concludes by offering some possible explanations for why the bioethical discourse has taken this form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on the works of the social scientist of Robert K. Merton. These include the "Matthew Effect," Technology and Science in Seventeenth-Century England, On the Shoulders of Giants, and his classic 1936 paper "The Unintended Consequences of Purposive Social Action," which has been cited in more than 160 journals. This article intends to create additional Histcite collections for his other works. While commenting upon his worldwide scholarly influence, the present paper calls particular attention to Merton's impact on information science and scientometrics. According to the author the multiples in scientific discovery had been one of the motivating factors in his pursuit of citation indexes for information retrieval, as reflected in my 1955 and 1964 papers in Science, and in several others thereafter. A stated goal of the Science Citation Index was to prevent or identify unwitting duplication of scientific discoveries. The author says that he often found examples of such duplication through bibliographic coupling or by cycling references that were cited by bibliographic plagiarists, as Merton might have described them.

The results from four studies are reported separately to test the idea that influential articles in psychology will be more readable than less influential ones. This idea is upheld when the papers involved are ones that have been highly rated by fellow colleagues (Studies 1 and 2) but it is not supported when the papers involved are highly-cited journal articles (Studies 3 and 4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While transnational research infrastructure projects long preceded the formal integration process that created the European Union, their advancement is an increasingly central part of EU research policy and of European integration in general. This paper analyses the Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure–European Research Infrastructure Consortium (BBMRI–ERIC) as a recent example of institutionalized scientific collaboration in Europe that has formally been established as part of EU science policy. BBMRI–ERIC, a network of European biobanks, is expected to contribute to both European science and European integration. Yet its achievements in these domains are interpreted differently by various actors involved. This paper draws on STS conceptualizations of infrastructures as relational, experimental, and promissory assemblages. These support the formulation of a working definition of research infrastructures that in turn helps to explore the heterogeneous meanings attributed to BBMRI–ERIC. The paper describes the creation of this distributed European research infrastructure, and divergent understandings of what it means for BBMRI–ERIC to be distributed, to be European and to be a research infrastructure. This analysis demonstrates how building a research infrastructure is also an effort to define what it means to be European—a process in which what is European about science and what science can do for Europe is continuously (re-)imagined, contested and negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In genomics, the clinical application of Next Generation Sequencing technologies (such as Whole Genome or Exome Sequencing) has attracted considerable attention from UK policymakers, interested in the benefits such technologies could bring the National Health Service. However, this boosterism plays little attention to the challenges raised by a kind of result known as a Variant of Uncertain Significance, or VUS, which require clinical geneticists and related colleagues to classify ambiguous genomic variants as 'benign' or 'pathogenic'. With a rigorous analysis based on data gathered at 290 clinical meetings over a two-year period, this paper presents the first ethnographic account of decision-making around NGS technology in a NHS clinical genomics service, broadening our understanding of the role formal criteria play in the classification of VUS. Drawing on Stefan Timmermans' concept of 'reflexive standardisation' to explore the way in which clinical genetics staff classify such variants this paper explores the application of a set of criteria drafted by the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, highlighting the flexible way in which various resources – variant databases, computer programmes, the research literature – are drawn on to reach a decision. A crucial insight is how professionals' perception of, and trust in, the clinical practice at other genomics centres in the NHS, shapes their own application of criteria and the classification of a VUS as either benign or pathogenic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the intense software filtering that has allowed the arXiv e-print repository to sort and process large numbers of submissions with minimal human intervention, making it one of the most important and influential cases of open access repositories to date. This article narrates arXiv’s transformation, using sophisticated sorting/filtering algorithms to decrease human workload, from a small mailing list used by a few hundred researchers to a site that processes thousands of papers per month. However, there are significant negative consequences for authors who have been filtered out of arXiv’s main categories. There is thus a continued need to check and balance arXiv’s boundaries, based on the essential tension between stability and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific authorship has been increasingly complemented with contributorship statements. While such statements are said to ensure more equitable credit and responsibility attribution, they also provide an opportunity to examine the roles and functions that authors play in the construction of knowledge and the relationship between these roles and authorship order. Drawing on a comprehensive and multidisciplinary dataset of 87,002 documents in which contributorship statements are found, this article examines the forms that division of labor takes across disciplines, the relationships between various types of contributions, as well as the relationships between the contribution types and various indicators of authors’ seniority. It shows that scientific work is more highly divided in medical disciplines than in mathematics, physics, and disciplines of the social sciences, and that, with the exception of medicine, the writing of the paper is the task most often associated with authorship. The results suggest a clear distinction between contributions that could be labeled as ‘technical’ and those that could be considered ‘conceptual’: While conceptual tasks are typically associated with authors with higher seniority, technical tasks are more often performed by younger scholars. Finally, results provide evidence of a U-shaped relationship between extent of contribution and author order: In all disciplines, first and last authors typically contribute to more tasks than middle authors. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the results for the reward system of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the typology of research in physics. It measures the proportion of various types of research currently published in physics. Without using standard sociological devices such as questionnaires, it is possible to arrive at quantitative measures of scientific measures of scientific change by analyzing research papers. Such papers are, from a typological point of view, the main product of scientific research. One can investigate changes in the proportion of theory to experiment in the work of researchers active within a given scientific area, over a particular period. In order to characterize the data some categories were presupposed and the abstracts were categorized into classes of those categories. The author divides all the abstracts into the new-accepted two main types of physics research: theoretical and experimental. The difference between some subgroups is not very sharp; the choice then depends on what the authors thought important enough to mention explicitly in the abstract.

Although it is broadly acknowledged that democratic politics should operate through the public competition of binding positions, the careful development of these positions is commonly neglected. Providing ethnographic analysis of the work of staff advisers in parliamentary groups, the paper explores the invisible work invested into these competing positions. We argue that the invisibilization of work serves to accomplish a central tenet of democratic political discourse: the demonstration of resonance between constituents and elected politicians. The latter may be assisted by – but must not depend on – non-elected staff. Against this 'sacred' premise of representative democracy, the paper shows that and how political positions are based on invisible work and the work of invisibilizing. Building on laboratory and workplace studies, we specify the shape and function of invisibility by contrasting studies on invisible work in the natural sciences, in case law, and in party politics. In these instances, invisible work serves different discursive objects-in-formation: scientific facts, legal cases, and binding positions. Understanding invisible work, thus, leads us to consider different constitutive relevancies. In turn, these serve to specify established concepts in STS, such as 'controversy,' to better distinguish the day-to-day conduct of natural science from that of politics or law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scientific community has begun using new information and communication technologies to increase the efficiency with which publications are disseminated. The trend is most marked in some areas of physic, where research papers are first circulated in the form of electronic unrefereed preprints through a service known as arXiv. In the first half of this paper, I explain how arXiv works, and describe the conceptual backstage and its growing influence. I will look at the motives behind the developing technologies and focus on the views of promoters and makers of the system. In the second half of the paper, I look at the eventual fate of papers initially circulated with arXiv. While it is argued that preprints are sufficient for the everyday scientific practice, nearly every paper in some specialities finds its way into formally peer-reviewed journals and proceedings. I argue that the continuation of traditional publication practices, in spite of their costs and inefficiencies when compared with arXiv, suggests that formally certified publication still has important roles. Certified publication verifies the relevance of scientific work and establishes professional credentials in the outer rings of the community, whose members are not sufficiently embedded in esoteric networks to make appropriate judgements on the basis of reading papers in isolation, or even through consultation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians and sociologists have highlighted the importance of skills, local practices and material culture in their studies of experimental sciences. This paper argues that the acquisition and transfer of skills in theoretical sciences should be understood in similar terms. Using the example of Feynman diagrams - first introduced by the US theoretical physicist Richard Feynman in 1948 as an aid for making certain kinds of calculations - we study how physicists in the USA, Japan, and the Soviet Union learned how to use the new tools and put them to work. Something about the diagrammatic tools could be learned from written instructions alone, at a distance from those physicists already 'in the know', although this type of transfer proved to be very difficult slow, and rare. The rate at which new physicists began to use the diagrams in various settings, and the types of uses to which the diagrams were put, reveal the interplay between geopolitics, personal communication, and pedagogical infrastructures in shaping how paper tools spread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ties between an internationalised science and transnational activism, in particular for causes considered universal, such as defending human rights, during the late Cold War. It focuses on a scientific network that supported mathematicians persecuted for their political views by both left- and right-wing undemocratic regimes. The Committee of Mathematicians was founded in 1974 and was active for a decade, built incrementally as a transnational advocacy network located in several Western countries. Focussing primarily on the Committee's French component, this article investigates the social and organisational underpinnings of its transnational action and defence of universal principles. It examines the modes of action and how they were shaped by scientists' professional and even disciplinary affiliations. These focal points allow an interrogation of the place the committee occupied within the space of human rights activism. The article aims to contribute to a historical sociology of the ties between science and politics and of the transnational trends that strained national frameworks, while moving away from an approach focussed solely on political macrotrends that fuelled the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizens, policy-makers and scientists all face the problem of assessing maverick scientific claims. Via a case study, I show the different resources available to experts and non-experts when they make these judgements and reflect upon what this means for technological decision-making in the public domain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this study, we explicate citing behavior in the writing of scientific papers by presenting a taxonomy of motives to cite. The suggested taxonomy consists of four main categories, which are purely descriptive: Argumentation, Social Alignment, Mercantile Alignment, and Data. These categories are divided into a suggested set of subcategories. We argue that the complexities of citing practice show how little can be assumed about actual citing behavior when studying a finished paper. The discussion supports the claim that it might be misleading to treat all citations as equal in quantitative citation analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The growth of the field of global health has prompted renewed interest in discursive aspects of North–South biomedical encounters, but analysis of the role of disciplinary identities and writing conventions remains scarce. In this article, I examine ways of framing pesticide problems in 88 peer-reviewed epidemiology papers produced by Northerners and their collaborators studying pesticide-related health impacts in Latin America. I identify prominent geographic frames in which truncated and selective histories of Latin America are used to justify research projects in specific research sites, which nevertheless function rhetorically as generic ‘developing country’ settings. These frames legitimize health sector interventions as solutions to pesticide-related health problems, largely avoiding more politically charged possibilities. In contrast, some epidemiologists appear to be actively pushing the bounds of epidemiology’s traditional journal article genre by engaging with considerations of political power, especially that of the international pesticide industry. I therefore employ a finer-grained analysis to a subsample of 20 papers to explore how the writing conventions of epidemiology interact with portrayals of poverty and pesticides in Latin America. Through analysis of a minor scientific controversy, authorial presence in epidemiology articles, and variance of framing strategies across genres, I show how the tension between ‘objectivity’ and ‘advocacy’ observed in Northern epidemiology and public health is expressed in North–South interaction. I end by discussing implications for postcolonial and socially engaged approaches to science and technology studies, as well as their relevance to the actual practice of global health research. In particular, the complicated interaction of the conflicted traditions of Northern epidemiology with Latin American settings on paper hints at a far more complex interaction in the form of public health programming involving researchers and research participants who differ by nationality, ethnicity, gender, profession, and class. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A study was carried out to test Garfield's claim that citationcounting can be used to predict Nobel prizewinners. Using a sample of 83eminent chemists, it was found that receipt of the Nobel Prize is indeedcorrelated with citation counts, but that it is more strongly correlatedwith the number of papers coauthored in which the senior author's nameis not the first in the list of authors. This result was tested out onthe 1976 Nobel prizewinner, W.N. Lipscomb. It was found that a rankingby numbers of papers not first-authored predicted that Lipscomb wouldreceive the Prize, whilst a ranking by citation counts would not havedone so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article demonstrates that the highly cited documents which clustered together were significant documents according to specialists. The succession of cluster maps suggested that the specialty had undergone a rather radical shift in research focus. In this regard too, the data reflected accurately the perceptions of the specialists. The citations provided, in effect, a physical and measurable manifestation of a collective mental switch from a static to a dynamic conception of collagen. Several specialists interviewed stressed the close knit character of their specialty, a few major centers of research, a small number of leading researchers and a high level of informal communications among researchers. There seems to be little doubt that the co-citation clusterin methodology has identified, at least in this case, a research specialty with all the characteristics ascribed to "invisible colleges." On the other hand, the collagen specialty differs in one important respect. There is no evidence in collagen of a self-conscious or deliberate revolutionary program being carried out by a group of researchers when the specialty underwent its conceptual shift in the early 1970's.

Seeds and other plant materials in seed and gene bank collections are rarely considered adequately conserved today unless genetically identical duplicate samples have been created and safely stored elsewhere. This paper explores the history of seed banking to understand how, why and with what consequences copying collections came to occupy this central place. It highlights a shift in the guiding metaphor for long-term preservation of seed collections, from banking to backup. To understand the causes and consequences of this shift in metaphor, the paper traces the intertwined histories of the central long-term seed storage facility of the United States (opened in 1958) and the international seed conservation system into which that facility was integrated in the 1970s. This account reveals how changing conceptions of security, linked to changing economic, political and technological circumstances, transformed both the guiding metaphors and the practices of seed conservation in these institutions. Early instantiations of long-term cold storage facilities vested security in robust infrastructures and the capacities of professional staff; between the 1960s and 1990s, this configuration gave way to one in which security was situated in copies rather than capacities. This observation ultimately raises questions about the security promised and achieved through present-day infrastructures for crop genetic resources conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publication of pharmaceutical company-sponsored research in medical journals, and its presentation at conferences and meetings, is mostly governed by 'publication plans' that extract the maximum amount of scientific and commercial value out of data and analyses through carefully constructed and placed papers. Clinical research is typically performed by contract research organizations, analyzed by company statisticians, written up by independent medical writers, approved and edited by academic researchers who then serve as authors, and the whole process organized and shepherded through to journal publication by publication planners. This paper reports on a conference of an international association of publication planners. It describes and analyzes their work in an ecological framework that relates it to marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies, medical journals and publishers, academic authors, and potential audiences. The medical research described here forms a new kind of corporate science, designed to look like traditional academic work, but performed largely to market products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]