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

本论文项目由科学、技术与社会计划资助，研究化学内部多个分支领域的交流实践以及与物理的跨界交流。万维网的兴起为创新科学传播提供了新的机会。最近的研究试图了解研究领域如何以及为什么在利用这些机会的方式上有所不同。本论文研究的主题是化学，这是一个很少受到研究人员关注的学科。它调查了化学社区内不同层次的社会组织，以及它与物理社区的交集如何与研究文化联系起来，以及它们如何在科学传播实践的形成中相互作用。为了研究交流模式和研究实践的集体形式，本研究结合了定性（人种志）方法和定量（网络分析）方法。它通过对研究实验室的化学家和物理学家的观察和采访，探索了社区的概念和科学交流的实践。它使用这些定性结果来解释出版网络。出版网络如何代表集体互动和交流的模式？网络分析能否被用于从地方民族志层面的研究扩大到对集体现象的描述和比较？这个项目的智力价值是双重的。首先，它开发了一种方法来比较在一个学科的共同背景下科学传播文化的差异。到目前为止，大多数研究都是观察和比较不相关研究领域的交际文化。其次，探讨了将定性和定量方法结合起来研究和比较科学传播文化的价值。特别是，它批判性地研究了在实际社会实践的背景下，从出版网络分析的新方法中定量结构的意义。预计这项研究的结果将通过有助于更好地理解研究文化和社区结构在塑造科学传播中的作用，影响电子科学和基于开放获取的学术传播服务的发展努力。这项研究预计将进一步与网络科学和更广泛的科学家、管理人员和政策制定者相关，因为它对纯定量方法研究科学集体的力量和局限性进行了批判性的评估。

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.