Workshop for Studying the Knowledge Creation Process with a Digital Archive of Manuscripts and Reviews

George Mason University, Fairfax VA

Investigators

Abstract

Much of science is found in peer-reviewed journals. However, researchers in the history or sociology of science cannot study what is accepted and what is rejected in these journals because until recently they did not have access to a body of data that included accepted and rejected manuscripts, the topics covered, the characteristics of those who submitted manuscripts, and the comments of the reviewers. Moreover, they did not have such data over time, so that they might see changes within a discipline in terms of topics and submitters. The American Sociological Association (ASA) has electronic copies of all the manuscripts and all the reviews for ASA journals for a twenty-year period between 1991 and 2010. Based on a prior three-year, NSF-funded project, the Center for Social Science Research (CSSR) at the George Mason University has created a Digital Archive that contains this information for the American Sociological Review, the ASA top journal. Given the complexities of the Archive data file, CSSR will hold a two-day workshop so that interested scholars can be trained to use it to answer critical questions about the history and development of sociology in a time-period of pronounced changes in the discipline. Faculty trained on the use of the archive will pass on this knowledge to their colleagues in sociology and other disciplines to further the study of the peer-review system for a flagship journal. This project is beneficial because it allows for scrutiny of the scientific process. This project will support a two-day workshop to be held in April 2019 to train faculty and graduate students in the use of the ASA/Mason American Sociological Review (ASR) Digital Archive. The Center for Social Science Research (CSSR) at the George Mason University has created a Digital Archive of more than 8,000 manuscripts and 26,000 reviews. The Archive includes demographic and institutional information of authors and reviews over a 20-year time-span. The Archive was created by examining all submitted manuscripts, matching them with reviewers, and using the internet to secure other information about authors and reviewers. This information was merged into four types of files, including author, reviewer, person, and manuscript information. Workshop participants will become familiar with the files and learn how to link them and/or how to use each separately, depending on the research question to be answered. Examining these files allows researchers to determine whether the peer networks of reviews are intellectually distant from those of authors, or whether both the author and the reviewer are in the same networks, thus suggesting the potential for reviewer bias. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.