An empirical investigation of the tribes and their territories: Are research specialisms rural and urban?

Abstract

We propose an operationalization of the rural and urban analogy introduced in Becher and Trowler [2001]. According to them, a specialism is rural if it is organized into many, smaller topics of research, with higher author mobility among them, lower rate of collaboration and productivity, lower competition for resources and citation recognitions compared to an urban specialism. It is assumed that most humanities specialisms are rural while science specialisms are in general urban: we set to test this hypothesis empirically. We first propose an operationalization of the theory in most of its quantifiable aspects. We then consider specialisms from history, literature, computer science, biology, astronomy. Our results show that specialisms in the humanities present a sensibly lower citation and textual connectivity, in agreement with their organization into more, smaller topics per specialism, as suggested by the analogy. We argue that the intellectual organization of rural specialisms might indeed be qualitative different from urban ones, discouraging the straightforward application of citation-based indicators commonly applied to urban specialisms without a dedicated re-design in acknowledgement of these differences.

Over-optimization of academic publishing metrics: observing Goodhart's Law in action

“…It is worth noting that while the study’s results provide evidence that many citation-based measures have become targets, there also may be other factors that influence academic publication trends. For example, the academic hypercompetitive environment itself may prompt an increase in productivity [81], hence increasing the number of papers. However, this claim contradicts the findings of Fanelli and Larivière that researchers’ individual productivity did not increase in the past century [52].…”

Spielwiesen: Preparing a Research Agenda on Playgrounds and Serious Work in Academia

“…More generally, the degree of paradigmatic openness as well as different styles of scientific thinking and reasoning might lead to different approaches to Spielwiesen (Crombie, 1994;Fleck, 1979). For example, following Becher and Trowler's (2001) conceptual distinction of "rural" and "urban" research specialisms, Colavizza, Franssen, & van Leeuwen (2019) find more and smaller topics per specialism in the humanities than in the natural sciences.…”

Know thy tools! Limits of popular algorithms used for topic reconstruction

“…Contributions in this direction are also provided by Chubin's (1976) review on specialties, who recognizes that "intellectual, cognitive, or problem content can generate different kinds of structure" (p. 449). And further by the hypothesis of a "hierarchy of the sciences" (Cole, 1983), distinguishing different "sciences" according to their ability to achieve consensus and accumulate knowledge (Fanelli & Glänzel, 2013), or the urban or rural organization of science (Colavizza et al, 2019). Edge & Mulkay (1976) contributed to what is known about shared commitments to knowledge by tracing the entanglement of "scientific and technical development" with the "evolution of social relationships" (ibid., 374) in their analysis of researchers forming and changing their collective orientation during the emergence and development of the specialty of radio astronomy (their study also analyzes several other specialties).…”

“…Further analyses, however, would depend on knowing to which degree these assumptions agree with which topic types (and some topic types might be reconstructed by some rules for formation made by the algorithms, or topic types which are characterized by efficient flow). What we know so far is, however, that (dense) communication structures are very different in different scientific fields (Colavizza et al, 2019) and that relevant differences exist in the knowledge production of the various sciences (Nagi & Corwin, 1972: 6-7;Whitley, 1977). Regarding the flexibility in size distribution, all four algorithms are flexible and produce community sizes across the whole range.…”