Scientific Papers and Publication Data

Raf Vanderstraeten, Ghent University

Historical-sociological accounts of modern science in Europe and the United States often focus on scientific publications. They make use of bibliographic databases, such as the Catalogue of Scientific Papers (published by the Royal Society of London beginning in 1867), the Web of Science (launched in 1964 by the Institute for Scientific Information, now owned by Clarivate Analytics), or other similar tools. Or they look into the demarcation and differentiation of scientific publishing from other forms of communication and the institutionalization of the norms that stabilize its social structure (such as the imperative of ‘publish or perish’). It is, in other words, often taken as given that scientific papers in indexed journals count. These publications constitute the point of departure of much historical-sociological accounts of science, while they are depicted as its basic unit. We may, however, also look into the history of these scientific publications themselves. Some studies have paid attention to the gradual standardization of the scientific paper – both before and after it became the basic unit that is listed and included in bibliographic databases. As lists of publication output are now standardly put to use as a means of assessing scientific productivity and reputation, we may also analyze how this standardization has changed our understandings of modern science. Building upon historical-sociological analyses of publication practices in the field of the educational sciences, the aim of this paper is to contribute to a discussion of the consequences of changes in the ways we define what counts in the world of science.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 26. Computational Approaches to Epistemic Change