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Economics has the reputation to be an insular discipline with little consideration for other social sciences and humanities (SSH). New research [Angrist et al, 2020, JEL] challenges this perception of economics: the perception would be historically inaccurate and especially at odds with the recent interdisciplinarity of economics. By systematically studying citation patterns since the 1950 in thousands of journals, we offer the best established conclusions to date on this issue. Our results do show that the discipline is uniquely insular from a historical point of view. But we also document an important turn after the 1990s that drastically transformed the discipline has it became more open, very quickly, to the influence of management, environmental sciences, and to a lesser degree, a variety of SSH. While this turn made economics less uniquely insular, as of today economics remains the least outward-looking discipline with management among all SSH. Furthermore, unlike in the other major social sciences, the most influential journals in economics have not significantly contributed to the recent increase in the interdisciplinarity of the discipline. While economics is changing, it is too soon to claim that it has completed an interdisciplinary turn.

Previous scholarly attention to the experiences of faculty members has emphasized the contexts of US institutions, with minimal attention to the experiences of faculty members at Canadian universities. This paper presents the findings of the Canadian component of an international survey that was administered in 19 different jurisdictions to understand the perceptions of faculty members about the nature and scope of changes to academic work. As such, the paper explores the perceptions on research and teaching of full-time faculty members affiliated with Canadian universities. Overall, faculty members revealed that Canadian universities have strong, engaging, and vibrant research and teaching environments, yet there are also areas for improvement. Specifically, findings showed that faculty members perceived considerable autonomy with respect to research activities, despite the increasing need to secure external funding for research. Also, faculty expressed substantial commitment to teaching undergraduate students but a lack of clarity about some issues related to graduate teaching. The survey results provide an important baseline for future studies of Canadian universities and the working conditions of the professoriate in a time of rapid institutional and professional change.

In order to show how formal analogies between different physical systems play an important conceptual work in physics, this paper analyzes the evolution of Einstein’s thoughts on the structure of radiation from the point of view of the formal analogies he used as “lenses” to “see” through the “black box” of Planck’s blackbody radiation law. A comparison is also made with his 1925 paper on the quantum gas where he used the same formal methods. Changes of formal points of view are most of the time taken for granted or passed over in silence in studies on the mathematization of physics as if they had no special significance. Revisiting Einstein’s classic papers on the nature of light and matter from the angle of the various theoretical tools he used, namely entropy and energy fluctuation calculations, helps explain why he was in a unique position to make visible the particle structure of radiation and the dual (particle and wave) nature of light and matter. Finally, this case study calls attention to the more general question of the surprising creative power of formal analogies and their frequent use in theoretical physics. This aspect of intellectual creation can be useful in the teaching of physics.

This article uses the methods of citation and network analysis to map the global structure of the intellectual field and its development over time. Through the case study of Mersenne's, Oldenburg's and Darwin's correspondences, we show how looking at letters as a corpus of data can provide a global representation of the evolving conversation going on in the Republic of Letters and in intellectual and scientific fields. Aggregating general correspondences in electronic format offers a global portrait of the evolving composition of the intellectual and scientific scene, its changing foci of interests and the fortune of the intellectual discussions as expressed in cited persons in the letters. Such tools help replace a purely metaphoric use of the term “network” by a visible map of the intellectual relations between people on which well defined calculations of the centrality of the positions of different actors can be made as well as their evolution over time. These techniques provide welcome additions to th...

Historians of science have analyzed in detail the conceptual transformations that gave physics its modern character in the first half of the twentieth century. Rarely provided in these narratives, however, is a feeling for the global scene of the physics community. How many publishing physicists were there around 1900? How many in 1925 or 1939? Did most physicists publish as single authors or in teams, and how did they compare with chemists or mathematicians in terms of scientific collaborations? What are the links between these disciplines? I propose to undertake such a global analysis of the trends that can be captured through a bibliometric analysis of hundreds of thousands of scientific papers and the more than one million references in them.

This paper examines the process by which medieval history became a specialized area of research among history departments of francophone universities of Quebec, from 1942 to the present. For more than forty years, the Institut d’études médiévales de Montréal was the dominant institution in the study of medieval philosophy, theology, and, later, literature. During the 1980s, however, its leadership declined and gradually passed to the various history departments. This had the consequence of transforming the multidisciplinary domain of medieval studies into the disciplinary field of medieval history.

Is Canadian sociology facing a crisis? Depending on one's point of view and temperament, one can always provide arguments for comfort or alarm. Although we recognize that some debates are difficult, if not impossible to settle, we are also convinced that most questions framed in terms of "crisis" are unfalsifiable and particularly ill-suited for constructive analysis, and can easily lead to tavern-like discussions and grandiose pronouncements. McLaughlin's recent discussions of Canadian sociology's future (McLaughlin, 2004, 2005, 2006) and the debate they have fuelled provide an illustration of such artificial polemics created by an inadequate formulation of the question and insufficient methodologies to provide an answer. McLaughlin emphasizes the institutional weakness of the Canadian sociological tradition. This institutional weakness would be a reflection of Canadian sociology's historical connections to the kind of social sciences practiced in the United-Kingdom and consequently explains its meagre appeal to the American scientific field (McLaughlin, 2004 and 2005). Assuming that British sociology is a "weakly institutionalized discipline" and that Canadian sociology is excessively embedded within this British tradition, it should surprise no one that McLaughlin concludes that "this has hurt the development of a strong sociological perspective in Canada" (McLaughlin, 2004: 89). Combined with two other major factors--the "flatness' or non-hierarchical nature of the Canadian education system and the left-wing orientation of Canadian sociology (McLaughlin, 2004)--the "British flavour" pervading Canadian universities has not only hampered the development of a "distinct and serious discipline" but threatens to make it "cease to exist in Canada in anything more than name alone" (McLaughlin, 2005: 6). In reading McLaughlin's articles it is unclear whether he believes the "Englishness" of Canadian sociology to be either a cause or the effect of a vague but persistent anti-American sentiment among Canadian scholars. This "relative indifference even hostility to American sociology" (McLaughlin, 2005: 19) nevertheless is treated as self-evident. "Far too much of Canadian sociology has become dominated by a knee-jerk anti-Americanism, leaving us vulnerable to falling uncritically in with trends in the European-oriented critical humanities." (McLaughlin, 2004: 92) Since the article provides the reader with no empirical evidence of such implicit "xenophobia", one is reluctant to take the author's word for it as the very existence of a homogeneous "American sociology" is dubious at best, given its high diversity in methods and approaches. Is McLaughlin correct in assuming that the continuing reliance of Canadian scholars on British sociology is "something that can be seen in terms of faculty hiring, university governance, and culture as well as the intellectual orientation of Canadian institutions of higher education" (McLaughlin 2004: 89)? Should readers believe him when he claims that American sociology is neglected by Canadian social scientists? We leave to others to assess if McLaughlin is right in arguing that England, "the homeland of empiricism, classical liberal political and economic thought, Fabian socialism and analytic philosophy", truly "remains a relative backwater with regards to the discipline of sociology" (McLaughlin, 2005: 16). What appears more problematic in our eyes is that throughout his three lengthy papers, the author mainly relies on quotations from a few Canadian sociologists, vague intuitions and unquestioned judgements to substantiate his claims. The only fact offered as hard evidence of the embedment of Canadian sociology within a British tradition is that "even as late as 1997, faculty in sociology departments with M.As and PhD. Programs in Canada where ten times more likely to be trained in Britain than faculty at equivalent institutions in the United States" (McLaughlin, 2004: 90, emphasis by the author). …

Harry Collins’ central argument about experimental practice revolves around the thesis that facts can only be generated by good instruments but good instruments can only be recognized as such if they produce facts. This is what Collins calls the experimenters’ regress. For Collins, scientific controversies cannot be closed by the ‘facts’ themselves because there are no formal criteria independent of the outcome of the experiment that scientists can apply to decide whether an experimental apparatus works properly or not. No one seems to have noticed that the debate is in fact a rehearsal of the ancient philosophical debate about skepticism. The present article suggests that the way out of radical skepticism offered by the so-called mitigated skeptics is a solution to the problem of consensus formation in science.  2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

In The Mangle of Practice, Andrew Pickering proposes a general analysis of scientific practice, defined as cultural extension and transformation in time (4), and centred on the dialectic of resistance and accommodation. The presentation of these two concepts in Chapter One is followed by four chapters of 'Instantiations' rehearsing Pickering's preferred case studies translated into the new language of 'resistance' and 'accommodation': quarks (more exactly the now well-known Morpurgo) (Chapter 2) and quaternions (Chapter 3) to which he adds his own reading of Peter Galison's study of the bubble chamber (Chapter 4) and David Noble's analysis of numerically controlled (N/C) machine tools (Chapter 5), in order to show that his 'dialectic of resistance and accommodation' is univer

International audience; Most current scientific policies incorporate debates on cities and the geographic organisation of scientific activity. Research on 'world cities' develops the idea that interconnected agglomerations can better take advantage of international competition. Thus, the increasing concentration of activities in these cities at the expense of others could be observed by certain scholars using measures based on scientific publications. Others, however, show that an opposite trend is emerging: the largest cities are undergoing a relative decline in a country's scientific activities. To go beyond this seeming contradiction, this paper provides a global analysis of all countries with papers in the Web of Science over the period 1987-2007. The author's addresses were geocoded and grouped into agglomerations. Registering of papers was based on the fractional counting of multi-authored publications, and the results are unambiguous: deconcentration is the dominant trend both globally and within countries, with some exceptions for which explanations are suggested; Beijing (Pékin), Tokyo, Paris, New York, Séoul, Londres... les grands foyers de la science pèsent moins que par le passé du fait d'une déconcentration géographique au niveau mondial. Tel est le résultat de l'analyse statistique systématique menée par des scientifiques du Laboratoire interdisciplinaire solidarités, sociétés, territoires (CNRS/Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail/EHESS) sur des millions d'articles de publications scientifiques, édités entre 1987 et 2007 dans des milliers de revues scientifiques recensées par le Web of Science. Ces travaux sont les premiers à s'intéresser à la géographie de la science au niveau de l'ensemble des villes mondiales.

Historically, papers have been physically bound to the journal in which they were published but in the electronic age papers are available individually, no longer tied to their respective journals. Hence, papers now can be read and cited based on their own merits, independently of the journal's physical availability, reputation, or Impact Factor. We compare the strength of the relationship between journals' Impact Factors and the actual citations received by their respective papers from 1902 to 2009. Throughout most of the 20th century, papers' citation rates were increasingly linked to their respective journals' Impact Factors. However, since 1990, the advent of the digital age, the strength of the relation between Impact Factors and paper citations has been decreasing. This decrease began sooner in physics, a field that was quicker to make the transition into the electronic domain. Furthermore, since 1990, the proportion of highly cited papers coming from highly cited journals has been decreasing, and accordingly, the proportion of highly cited papers not coming from highly cited journals has also been increasing. Should this pattern continue, it might bring an end to the use of the Impact Factor as a way to evaluate the quality of journals, papers and researchers., 14 pages, 5 figures

This chapter is an analysis of job satisfaction reported by full-time academic staff in Canadian universities as part of the Changing Academic Profession (CAP) project. We begin this chapter by providing a brief overview of the context of academic work in Canadian universities, followed by a description of the methodology for the survey of university academics that provided the foundation for this analysis. We then report and discuss study findings related to overall job satisfaction, provide an analysis of academic staff satisfaction with a range of workplace and institutional factors, and explore differences in reported satisfaction by demographic characteristics of academic staff. We summarise our findings and offer a number of conclusions in the final section of this chapter.

Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this "OA Advantage" may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and greatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for the more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only., 30 pages, 15 figures, 8 tables

Changes in citation distributions over 100 years can reveal much about the evolution of the scientific communities or disciplines. The prevalence of uncited papers or of highly-cited papers, with respect to the bulk of publications, provides important clues as to the dynamics of scientific research. Using 25 million papers and 600 million references from the Web of Science over the 1900-2006 period, this paper proposes a simple model based on a random selection process to explain the "uncitedness" phenomenon and its decline in recent years. We show that the proportion of uncited papers is a function of 1) the number of articles published in a given year (the competing papers) and 2) the number of articles subsequently published (the citing papers) and the number of references they contain. Using uncitedness as a departure point, we demonstrate the utility of the stretched-exponential function and a form of the Tsallis function to fit complete citation distributions over the 20th century. As opposed to simple power-law fits, for instance, both these approaches are shown to be empirically well-grounded and robust enough to better understand citation dynamics at the aggregate level. Based on an expansion of these models, on our new understanding of uncitedness and on our large dataset, we are able provide clear quantitative evidence and provisional explanations for an important shift in citation practices around 1960, unmatched in the 20th century. We also propose a revision of the "citation classic" category as a set of articles which is clearly distinguishable from the rest of the field., 20 pages, 5 figures

In fall 1984, I had the good fortune to meet Sam Schweber when I arrived at Harvard University’s Department of History of Science as a visiting scholar with a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Having been trained first in physics, I remembered his name as the author of the formidably difficult (for me!) Introduction to Relativistic Quantum Field Theory, which I had closed as soon as I had opened it, as I immediately realized that the approach was too formal for my taste. Not yet familiar with his infinite generosity and attention to young scholars, I was really amazed that he asked me to work with him on an essay review of Andy Pickering’s book, Constructing Quarks.1 I remember that I told him right away that he would have made a good priest with his very humanist attitude toward people. This profoundly humanist aspect of Sam’s personality makes him very concerned about the future of the discipline of history of science as a community of scholars, and in this contribution in his honor I would like to briefly address one of the reasons which, I think, contributes to explain the actual predicament that historians of science face. I will not raise the obvious question of access to the job market and the possible overproduction of PhDs in the field. Instead, I want to discuss a tension inherent in the discipline of history of science, which, I think, lies at the heart of the recent debates about the state of the discipline. Probably more than any other kind of historians, historians of science are torn between several masters: scientists, philosophers, sociologists and general historians. Fifteen years ago, Paul Forman made a major contribution to the question of the intimate relation between historians of science and scientists, condemning the lack of intellectual autonomy of the former from the latter.2 But his call for “independence not transcendence for the historian of science” is still to be fulfilled when one sees the various pressures scientists put on historians of science who want to do more than simply contribute to the creation and celebration of the internal mythology of scientific disciplines. While Forman had a moral view of the need for independence, insisting that each individual had to stand up and fight for his or her autonomous judgment, I think that an institutional analysis provides a better way to identify mechanisms in which this autonomy could be grounded.

If the meanings of these terms are not clear, reading Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics will make them so. His book provides a lucid introduction to, and a thorough explanation of, the concepts of modern particle physics. But it is much more than that: it is an important, interesting, admirably documented, detailed history of the construction of the 'standard model' presently deployed in high-energy physics [HEP], written in a clear, unpretentious style piqued here and there with wry humour. Only someone with Pickering's technical background - a PhD in theoretical high-energy physics - could have carried out the task he undertook. The historical, sociological and physics components of Pickering's presentation will certainly impress the scientific community - but, as importantly, the book should also be accessible to the interested general reader who is equipped with a 'basic scientific education' and is willing to expend the effort to understand popular scientific writing at the level of the articles to be found in Scientific American. Pickering's exposition is rich in insights and reflects his command of the subject matter. Indicative of this mastery is the dearth of equations to be found in the book. Explanations are never verbal translations of equations. Rather, they depend on analogies and the development of intuitions based on readily visualizable examples. This impressive ability to expound arcane mathematical and physical concepts is but one of the book's achievements. Pickering has also succeeded in making clear the important progress that quarks, gauge theories, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and grand unified theories (GUTs) represent. In his exposition, he has rightly emphasized how the

In March 1987 the federal, provincial and territorial governments of Canada signed the first National Science and Technology Policy. This marked the culmination of a period of cooperation in contrast to the previous diversity of interests; there is a new economic imperative in the formation of S&T policy. Canada’s experiments in nation-building through S&T are heavily dependant on the ability to pool the R&D resources within the constituent elements. Both federal and provincial efforts will serve to harness Canada’s vast potential for meeting the challenges of international competitiveness.

In the last century, the development of the social sciences in institutions of higher learning has been nothing short of spectacular. This is especially true when considering the period opened by the Second World War, a time when the number of students rose exponentially, faculty body grew accordingly, and the volume of research and publications skyrocketed. Yet a global and quantitative analysis of the evolution of Canadian social sciences is still lacking. If some excellent monographs have contributed to a better knowledge of specific disciplines, Canadian scholars did not produce a global cartography of social sciences' development over the last century. This is precisely what this paper endeavours to provide. Its first section explores the rise in student enrolment (with a special analysis of gender composition), the second looks at the growth of faculty hiring and the third section suggests some hypotheses concerning the spectacular growth of social science disciplines through a discussion of Frank and Gabler's recent book, Reconstructing the University. These sections will provide an introductory global overview of the evolution of social sciences in university-level institutions in Canada. This historical analysis will help us better grasp the changes that affected Canadian social sciences through the last century., Durant le dernier siècle, le développement des sciences sociales dans les institutions canadiennes d’enseignement supérieur a été spectaculaire. En effet, pendant la période qui suit la Seconde Guerre mondiale, le nombre d’étudiants a augmenté de manière exponentielle, le corps professoral a suivi en proportion, et le volume de la recherche et des publications a explosé. Pourtant une analyse globale et quantitative de l’évolution des sciences sociales canadiennes manque encore. Si d’excellentes monographies ont contribué à une meilleure connaissance de l’histoire de certaines disciplines, les chercheurs canadiens n’ont pas encore produit une cartographie globale du développement des sciences sociales dans le dernier siècle. C’est précisément ce que cet article tente d’accomplir. Dans la première section, nous explorons la montée des inscriptions étudiantes (avec une attention portée à la question du genre); dans le seconde, nous nous attardons à la croissance du corps professoral; dans la troisième, nous formulons quelques hypothèses pour expliquer cette croissance spectaculaire à travers une discussion du livre de Frank et Gabier, Reconstructing the University. En présentant l’évolution numérique des sciences sociales dans les institutions universitaires canadiennes, ce premier survol général nous permet de mieux saisir les changements qui ont affecté les sciences sociales canadiennes depuis plus d’un siècle.