Doctoral Dissertation Research: Comparative Analysis of Scientific Communication Cultures in Chemistry

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation project funded by the Science, Technology & Society Program investigates communication practices of multiple subfields within chemistry and across the boundary with physics. The rise of the World Wide Web has provided new opportunities to innovate scientific communication. Recent research seeks to understand how and why research fields differ in the manner in which they take up these opportunities. This dissertation project focuses on chemistry, a discipline that has received little attention from researchers. It investigates how various levels of social organization within the chemistry community and at its intersection with the physics community link to research cultures and how they interact in the shaping of scientific communication practices. To study communication patterns and collective forms of research practice, this study combines qualitative (ethnographic) methods and quantitative (network analytic) methods. It explores notions of community and practices of scientific communication through observations and interviews of chemists and physicists at research labs. It uses these qualitative results to ground the interpretation of publication networks. How do publication networks represent patterns of collective interaction and communication? Can network analysis be used to scale-up from a local ethnographic level of study to a description and comparison of collective phenomena? The intellectual merit of this project is twofold. First, it develops an approach for comparisons of variations in scientific communication cultures within the shared context of a discipline. So far most studies have looked at and compared communicative cultures of unrelated research fields. Second, it explores the value of combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to study and compare scientific communication cultures. In particular, it critically investigates the meaning of quantitative constructs from new approaches to publication network analysis in the context of actual social practices. Results of this study are expected to impact development efforts in e-science and open access based scholarly communication services by contributing to a better understanding of the role of research cultures and community structures in shaping scientific communication. The study is expected to be further relevant to network science and to a wider audience of scientists, administrators, and policy makers because of its critical appraisal of the power and limitations of a purely quantitative approach to the study of scientific collectives.