1. Knowledge Domains & Communities of Practice
Science & Technology Social Sciences

2. Science objectively establishes truth, but does not control the context in which the scientific discovery will assist in the creation of knowledge

3. the nature of knowledge
realist
social

4. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Realist nature of knowledge: world is completely objective (pure realism)
Social nature of knowledge: there is no foundation to knowledge apart from the perception of humans (purely socially determined)

5. Science & Technology Social Sciences
If scientific truth is objective, it is also blind
Prejudice against social and behavioral research on the grounds that it is ‘soft’ or concerned with trivial questions

6. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Possible use or misuse of research findings
Critics argue that scientific data may be used to justify social stratification and prejudice, or that certain groups will appear to be genetically inferior
Behavioral research - human subjects used in studies of heredity and human behavior, genetics, race and IQ, psychobiology, or sociobiology

7. Science & Technology Social Sciences
S/R: Standards of evidence are not hopelessly culture-bound, though judgements of justification are always perspectival = knowledge is truth-indicative but not absolute
Knowledge is built through the perspectives of our disciplines

8. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Individuals’ beliefs formed based on information supplied by others (social nature of knowledge)
Cognitive effort within communities = condition upon which communities form consensus:
attribution of authority
division of opinion

9. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Knowledge chains form an important part of journals’ content - reflecting social/realist nature of knowledge
Knowledge chains: rhetoric & epistemology
Rhetoric:persuasion, argument, discourse
Epistemology: knowledge is produced through human action
Journal content (reliability & attribution)

10. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Reliability:
Source of the chain (speaker)
Bodies of evidence supporting chains
Perspectival processes shaped by social forces (gender, national origin, social structures of scholarship and research - does it embrace multiple perspectives on which knowledge claims are based)

11. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Attribution:
realized through citation of published work: epistemic (idea); or procedural (author’s work)
reporting of observed facts

12. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Information policy literature (Rowland)
ISI citation indexes to define document test collection
Assumption: authors interact with existing knowledge through referencing behavior (use of the accumulating body of recorded literature)

13. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Accumulation of a body of recorded literature varies according to subject areas:
How older materials are knitted into the fabric of more recent publication through citation
Science and technology: select nucleus of specific journals; brief span of time covering a few current years
Social sciences & humanities: greater dispersion of publications in different forms, on different subjects & over a comparatively long span of time
Ephemeral vs. classical literature

14. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Price (1970) - Price’s index (how references are distributed over an archive of material)
Comte ( ): hard science (physics, biochemistry), soft science (social science), non-science (humanities)

15. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Cole (1983)
fundamental differences bw disciplines lie not in citation habits but in the structure of their knowledge systems, particularly in relation to how empirical knowledge is codified into succinct and interdependent theoretical statements
Cozzens (1985)
Periods of intellectual focus; reception - obsolescence

16. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Bradford (1934)
Core ‘zones’; core - scatter
Nadel (1980)
catholicity of interests is a function of the maturity of a specialty (institutionalization level)

17. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Other observations
disciplinary conventions & personal inclination determine the breadth of influences on a researcher (information-seeking patterns)
less highly structured or specialized disciplines: people read widely outside their own current areas of concern (arts and humanities - information from a wide variety of sources)
coauthoring: sciences (apparatus for experimentation); social sciences (division of labor as strategy); humanities (not practiced)

18. Science & Technology Social Sciences
Other observations
institutional arrangements supporting & encouraging research
degree of institutionalization (professional associations, specialist journals)
debates over establishment of new forms of institutional knowledge and established academic fields