SCIT Publications

Systematic communication about methods, theories, findings, and the state of the disciplines is central to modern science. The patterns of communication between scientists, as well as their work styles, have changed substantially not only since the founding of the first journals and scientific societies in the 17th century, but even in the last few decades. Scientists’ Knowledge Networks (KNs) are formed of nodes (forums) that include seminars, data archives, working paper collections conferences, journals and scientific libraries. The structuring of KNs varies from one field to another working paper collections play a much more important role in high energy physics than they do in molecular biology while conference publications are much more important in computer science than they are in molecular biology or most of the social sciences. In addition, the structure of KNs in a discipline changes over time with the rise and fall in the importance of particular nodes, such as specific conferences or journals.

This era is marked by significant experimentation in the use of electronic media in creating new nodes of scientific KNs and in restructuring existing nodes. Examples of new nodes include new "pure" electronic journals, on-line conferences, and disciplinary corpora of shareable data. Examples of the restructuring of nodes include the efforts by some paper journals, such as Science or Physics Review Letters, to develop electronic versions; to develop WWW sites for paper journals that include the tables of contents of forthcoming issues and paper abstracts; and of conferences to publish detailed "programs- in-process" on WWW sites. The nodes are not just technologies; they involve varied, but complex and subtle social practices for reviewing/filtering acceptable communications. These developments are reshaping the KNs of various fields in ways that we do not effectively comprehend.

There is excitement about the expansion of scientific communications that these developments enable. But the viability of these new and altered forums has varied across the disciplines. On-line libraries of working papers have become important in high energy physics, and of some value in computer science; but they seem to be of little interest to chemists and biomedical researchers. Biologists have developed elaborate on-line corpora for sharing data (in fields that study model organisms), but they are less common outside of biology. Pure electronic journals have not yet become central nodes, while hybrid paper-electronic journals attract substantial interest.

This heterogeneity of shifts in disciplinary KNs seems to stimulate two major responses. One view is that there is a set of "best practices" that may be developed in some fields (such as e-print servers in high energy physics) that other scientists will (and should) adopt. The other view is one that respects the diversity of Knowledge Networking in the various disciplines, and assumes that some evolutionary processes in "the community" or "the market" will develop appropriate uses of electronic media over time.

The risk of the "best practice" approach is to hold up communication practices that fit only certain fields as models for all fields. Pure evolution risks many more failures -- resulting in wasted scarce resources and also "knowledge losses" from unsustainable forums. The risks of could have been reduced by an empirically-grounded analytical understanding of why various disciplines structure their KNs as they do. This multi-disciplinary project's "middle way" alternative advances well beyond prior research to inform disciplinary experimentation in restructuring KNs. Prior field studies indicate that scientists' willingness to trust the value of specific nodes as sources of legitimate and reliable knowledge and as forums in which they will receive appropriate credit for their contributions influences their willingness to read, publish, and participate in specific nodes. Issues of trust have been resolved in different fields in different ways with paper media, and electronic media open up new opportunities and also new risks. The nature of "good citizenship" in roles such as organizer, editor and reviewer may shift in electronic forums in ways that mesh well or badly with the cultures of different disciplines.

This multi-disciplinary study will improve our understanding of why various disciplines structure their KNs as they do. It entails a comparative empirical study of the changes between 1970-1999 in the structure of KNs in six fields that are at different levels of maturity, that have different KN structures, and that have also adopted different forms of electronic media as important nodes in their KNs: molecular biology - model organisms, molecular biology - protein crystallography, particle physics, astrophysics, human-computer interaction, and information systems. Data will be drawn from published and on-line sources, as well as extensive interviews with editors, forum organizers, and active scientists in each of the six fields -conducted at their universities and laboratories.