Bibliometric Features as Symbolic Markers of Disciplinary Boundaries: a Sociological Perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14515/monitoring.2024.6.2627Keywords:
saliency, symbolic markers, experiment, bibliometrics, disciplinary boundaries, sociology of scienceAbstract
Symbolic markers (as those used in “we-they” attributions) help delineate whether a scientist (among other things) finds themselves at the intersection, within, or outside the confines of a given disciplinary boundary, thereby facilitating the swift navigation across an ever-growing corpus of scientific literature. Frequently, these boundaries are revealed through bibliometric analysis, which makes it possible to observe some quantifiable characteristics of the features of the proposed boundaries. Nevertheless, this method falls short of providing a sociologically meaningful interpretation, particularly regarding the historical dynamics and the demarcation of scientific disciplinary communities, unless the subjective salience of these observable features is meticulously considered.
To measure the salience of bibliometric features: 1) we selected “façade” features (such as the length of titles counted in words, length of reference lists, and number of co-authors) and analyzed them using metadata from Russian sociological and psychological journals; 2) using an experimental methodology in a separate study, we addressed two disciplinary groups of scientists tasked to guess the distribution parameters of these features in two types of articles affiliated with corresponding disciplines — this procedure assessed the accuracy of intuitive everyday predictions, indicating the effect of implicit background knowledge about the features that could be used as heuristics for disciplinary attribution.
Comparing the predictions with bibliometric data, we found that the reference list length was the most salient perceptual feature, especially in the case of psychological articles. Title length was salient to sociologists at the intragroup level, helping them differentiate between disciplines.
The article discusses the comparative significance and prospects for further use of objectively observed bibliometric differences to formulate and test hypotheses about the internal principles of demarcation and the processes of mutual influence of scientific disciplines. The methodology tested in this study has the potential to obtain additional knowledge regarding the results of previously conducted and planned scientometric studies.
References
Андреев И. С., Девятко И. Ф. Влияет ли ненаправленное научение на повышение точности житейских прогнозов: эксперимент в области социального метапознания // Вестник Института социологии. 2022. № 4. С. 115-129. https://doi.org/10.19181/vis.2022.13.4.852.
Andreev I. S., Deviatko I. F. (2022) Influence of Undirected Learning on Improving the Accuracy of Everyday Predictions: An Experiment in Social Metacognition. Vestnik instituta sotziologii. Vol. 13. No. 4. P. 115-129. https://doi.org/10.19181/vis.2022.13.4.852. (In Russ.)
Гофман А.Б. «Интер», «мульти», «транс» и «пост»: социология, дисциплинарность и постмодернизм // Социологические исследования. 2021. Т. 47. № 2. С. 15-25. https://doi.org/10.31857/S013216250013028-3.
Goffman A. B. (2021) “Inter”, “Multi”, “Trans” and “Post”: Sociology, Disciplinarity and Postmodernism. Sociological Studies. Vol. 47. No. 2. P. 15-25. https://doi.org/10.31857/S013216250013028-3. (In Russ.)
Девятко И. Ф. Диагностическая процедура в социологии. Очерк истории и теории. М.: Наука, 1993.
Deviatko I. (1993) The Diagnostic Procedure in Sociology. Essay on History and Theory. Moscow: Nauka. (In Russ.)
Девятко И. Ф. «Мудрость толп» и «мудрость внутри»: сравнительная точность групповых и индивидуальных суждений о дискретных социальных фактах // Социология: методология, методы, математическое моделирование. 2012. № 34. С. 81-104.
Deviatko I. F. (2012) “Wisdom of Crowds” and “Wisdom Within”: Comparative Accuracy of Group and Individual Judgments about Discrete Social Facts. Sociology: Methodology, Methods, Mathematical Modeling. No. 34. P. 81-104. (In Russ.)
Девятко И. Ф., Абрамов Р. Н., Кожанов А. А. О пределах и природе дескриптивного обыденного знания о социальном мире // Социологические исследования. 2010. № 9. С. 3-17.
Deviatko I. F., Abramov R. N., Kozhanov A. A. (2010) On Limits and Nature of Descriptive Everyday Cognition in The Social World. Sociological Studies. No. 9. P. 3-17. (In Russ.)
Батыгин Г. С. Происхождение социологии // Вестник Академии наук СССР. 1991. № 2. С. 68—78.
Batygin G. S. (1991) The Origin of Sociology. Bulletin of the USSR Academy of Sciences. No. 2. P. 68—78. (In Russ.)
Батыгин Г.С., Девятко И.Ф. Дело профессора З.Я. Белецкого // Свободная мысль. 1993. № 11. Репринт в сб. Философия не кончается… Из истории отечественной философии. ХХ век. В 2 кн. кн. 1. 20—50-е годы / под ред. В.А. Лекторского. М.: РОССПЭН. 1998. С. 218—242.
Batygin G. S., Deviatko I. F. (1998) The case of Professor Z.Ya. Beletsky. Philosophy Never Ends. Moscow: ROSSPEN. P. 218-242. (In Russ.)
Китчин Р. Большие данные, новые эпистемологии и смена парадигм // Социология: методология, методы, математическое моделирование. 2017. № 44. С. 111-152.
Kitchin R. (2017) Big Data, New Epistemologies and Paradigm Shifts. Sociology: Methodology, Methods, Mathematical Modeling. No. 44. P. 111-152. (In Russ.)
Кожанов А. А. Обращение с аргументом «неявного знания» внутри «когнитивной» социологии науки // Давыдовские чтения: исторические горизонты теоретической социологии. Сборник научных докладов симпозиума, 13-14 октября 2011 г. / под ред. И.Ф. Девятко, Н.К. Орловой. М.: Институт социологии РАН, 2011. С. 56-68.
Kozhanov A. A. (2011) Handling The “Tact Knowledge” Argument within “Cognitive” Sociology of Science. In: Deviatko I. F., Orlova N. K. (eds.) Davydov Readings. Moscow: Institute of Sociology, RAS. P. 56-68. (In Russ.)
Моисеев С.П., Мальцева Д.В. Отбор источников для систематического обзора литературы: сравнение экспертного и алгоритмического подходов // Социология: методология, методы, математическое моделирование. 2018. № 47. С. 7-43.
Moiseev S. P., Maltseva D. V. (2018) Selecting Sources for a Systematic Literature Review: A Comparison of Expert and Algorithmic Approaches. Sociology: Methodology, Methods, Mathematical Modeling. No. 47. P. 7-43. (In Russ.)
Николаев В. Г. Социологическая теория в России: на распутьях фрагментации и плюрализма // Социологические исследования. 2022. № 1. С. 30-40. https://doi.org/10.31857/S013216250017450-8.
Nikolaev V. G. (2022) Sociological Theory in Russia: At The Crossroads of Fragmentation and Pluralism. Sociological Studies. Vol. 1. No. 1. P. 30-40. https://doi.org/10.31857/S013216250017450-8. (In Russ.)
Полани М. Личностное знание: на пути к посткритической философии / под ред. В. А. Лекторского, В. А. Аршинова. М., 1995.
Polanyi M. (1995) Personal Knowledge: on The Way to Post-Critical Philosophy. Moscow. (In Russ.)
Соколов М. М. Изучаем локальные академические сообщества // Социологические исследования. 2012. № 6. С. 76-82.
Sokolov M. M. (2012) Studying Local Academic Communities. Sociological Studies. No. 6. P. 76-82. (In Russ.)
Anguera M. T., Blanco-Villaseñor A., Losada J. L., Sánchez-Algarra P., Onwuegbuzie A. J. (2018) Revisiting the Difference Between Mixed Methods and Multimethods: Is It All in The Name? Quality & Quantity. Vol. 52. P. 2757-2770. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-018-0700-2.
Baker D. B. (2012) The Oxford Handbook of the History of Psychology. New Models in Geography. Vol. 2. No. 12. P. 295—317. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315830742-27.
Batygin G. S., Deviatko I. F. (1994a) The Metamorphoses of Russian Sociology. In: Keen M.F., Mucha J.L. (eds.) Eastern Europe in Transformation. The Impact on Sociology. Westport, CT: Praeger. P. 11-23.
Batygin G. S., Deviatko I. F. (1994b) Russian Sociology: Its Origins and Current Trends. In: Mohan R. P., Wilke A. S. (eds.) International Handbook of Contemporary Developments in Sociology. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Becker H. S. (2003) Long-Term Changes in The Character of The Sociological Discipline: A Short Note on The Length of Titles of Articles Submitted to The American Sociological Review During the Year 2002. American Sociological Review. Vol. 68. No. 3. P. 5-7. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240306800301.
Bowker G. C. (2006) Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bourdieu P. (1995) La cause de la Science. Actes de La Recherche En Sciences Sociales. Vol. 106-107. No. 1. P. 3-10. https://doi.org/10.3917/arss.p1995.106n1.0003.
Boyd R., Richerson P. J. (1987) The Evolution of Ethnic Markers. Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 2. No. 1. P. 65-79. https://www.jstor.org/stable/656396.
Bowman T. D., Tsou A., Ni C., Sugimoto C. R. (2014) Post-Interdisciplinary Frames of Reference: Exploring Permeability and Perceptions of Disciplinarity in the Social Sciences. Scientometrics. Vol. 101. P. 1695—1714. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1338-z.
Buxton A. B. (1987) Titles Revisited. Journal of Documentation. Vol. 43. No. 1. P. 65-68. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026802.
Converse J. M. (2017) Survey Research in The United States: Roots and Emergence 1890-1960. London: Taylor and Francis.
Ductor L. (2015) Does Co‐Authorship Lead to Higher Academic Productivity? Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics. Vol. 77. No. 3. P. 385-407. https://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12070.
Fisher B. S., Cobane C. T., Vander Ven T. M., Cullen F. T. (1998) How Many Authors Does It Take to Publish an Article? Trends and Patterns in Political Science. PS: Political Science, Politics. Vol. 31. No. 4. P. 847-856. https://doi.org/10.2307/420730.
Fortunato S., Bergstrom C. T., Börner K., Evans J. A., Helbing D., Milojević S., Petersen A. M., Radicchi F., Sinatra R., Uzzi B., Vespignani A., Waltman L., Wang D., Barabási, A. L. (2018) Science of science. Science. Vol. 359. No. 6379. Art. eaao0185. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao0185.
Gadd E., Baldwin A., Norris M. (2010) The Citation Behaviour of Civil Engineering Students. Journal of Information Literacy. Vol. 4. No. 2. P. 37-49. https://hdl.handle.net/2134/8257.
Gieryn T. F. (1983) Boundary-Work and The Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists. American Sociological Review. P. 781-795. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095325.
Gieryn T. F. (2010) Paradigm for the Sociology of Science. In Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociology as Science. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. P. 113-139. https://doi.org/10.7312/calh15112-006.
Griffiths T. L., Tenenbaum J. B. (2006) Optimal Predictions in Everyday Cognition. Psychological Science. Vol. 17. No. 9. P. 767-773. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01780.
Habibzadeh F., Yadollahie M. (2010) Are Shorter Article Titles More Attractive for Citations? Crosssectional Study of 22 Scientific Journals. Croatian Medical Journal. Vol. 51. No. 2. P. 165—170. https://doi.org/10.3325/cmj.2010.51.165.
Haggan M. (2004) Research Paper Titles in Literature, Linguistics and Science: Dimensions of Attraction. Journal of Pragmatics. Vol. 36. No. 2. P. 293—317. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0378-2166(03)00090-0.
Hartley J. (2007) Planning that Title: Practices and Preferences for Titles with Colons in Academic Articles. Library and Information Science Research. Vol. 29. No. 4. P. 553—568. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2007.05.002.
Heilbron J., Bokobza A. (2015) Transgresser les Frontières en Sciences Humaines et Sociales en France. Actes de La Recherche En Sciences Sociales. Vol. 210. No. 6. P. 108—121. https://doi.org/10.3917/arss.210.0108.
Henriksen D. (2016) The Rise in Co-Authorship in The Social Sciences (1980—2013). Scientometrics. Vol. 107. No. 2. P. 455-476. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1849-x.
Kim E. (2015) Remnants of Culture in Journal Article Titles: a Comparison Between the United States and Korea in the Field of Social Sciences. Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society. Vol. 46. No. 1. P. 345-372. https://doi.org/10.16981/kliss.46.201503.345.
Lamont M. (2009) How Professors Think: inside The Curious World of Academic Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lamont M., Molnár V. (2002) The Study of Boundaries in The Social Sciences. Annual Review of Sociology. No. 28. P. 167—195. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.141107.
Lewandowsky S., Griffiths T. L., Kalish, M. L. (2009) The Wisdom of Individuals: Exploring People's Knowledge about Everyday Events Using Iterated Learning. Cognitive Science. Vol. 33. No. 6. P. 969-998. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01045.x.
Lynch M., Woolgar S. (1988) Introduction: Sociological Orientations to Representational Practice in Science. Human Studies. Vol. 11. No. 2/3. P. 99-116. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20009022.
Matveeva N., Sterligov I., Lovakov A. (2022) International Scientific Collaboration of Post-Soviet Countries: A Bibliometric Analysis. Scientometrics. Vol. 127. No. 3. P. 1583-1607. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04274-0.
Milojević S. (2017) The Length and Semantic Structure of Article Titles—Evolving Disciplinary Practices and Correlations with Impact. Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics. No. 2. https://doi.org/10.3389/frma.2017.00002.
Moed H. F., Markusova V., Akoev M. (2018) Trends in Russian Research Output Indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. Scientometrics. No. 116. P. 1153-1180. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2769-8.
Moody J. (2006) Trends in Sociology Titles. The American Sociologist. Vol. 37. No. 1. P. 77-80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-006-1016-6.
Moody J., Edelmann A., Light R. (2022) 100 years of Social Forces as Seen through Bibliometric Publication Patterns. Social Forces. Vol. 101. No. 1. P. 38-75. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soac046.
Mozer M. C., Pashler H., Homaei H. (2008) Optimal Predictions in Everyday Cognition: The Wisdom of Individuals or Crowds? Cognitive Science. Vol. 32 No. 7. P. 1133-1147. https://doi.org/10.1080/03640210802353016.
Nagano R. L. (2015) Research Article Titles and Disciplinary Conventions: A Corpus Study of Eight Disciplines. Journal of Academic Writing. Vol. 5. No. 1. P. 133-144. http://dx.doi.org/10.18552/joaw.v5i1.168.
Porter R., Ross D. (eds.) (2003) The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lacour J., Bucalossi P., Cacers E., Jacobelli G., Koszarowski T., Le M., ... Veronesi U. (1976) Radical Mastectomy Versus Radical Mastectomy Plus Internal Mammary Dissection. Five‐Year Results of an International Cooperative Study. Cancer. Vol. 37. No. 1. P. 206-214. https://doi.org/10.1002/1097-0142(197601)37:1%3C206::AID-CNCR2820370130%3E3.0.CO;2-M.
Rawat K. S., Sood S. K. (2021) Emerging Trends and Global Scope of Big Data Analytics: a Scientometric Analysis. Quality & Quantity. Vol. 55. No. 4. P. 1371-1396. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-020-01061-y.
Richerson P. J., Boyd R. (2001) Institutional Evolution in The Holocene: The Rise of Complex Societies.
In: W.G. Runciman (ed.) The Origin of Human Social Institutions, Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol. 110. P. 197-204.
Reynolds K. H. (2001) The Social Identity Perspective in Intergroup Relations: Theories, Themes, and Controversies. In Brown R., Gaertner S. L. (eds.) Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Intergroup Processes. Vol. 3. P. 133—152. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470693421.
Soler V. (2007) Writing Titles in Science: An Exploratory Study. English for Specific Purposes. Vol. 26. No. 1. P. 90-102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2006.08.001.
Turner J. C. (1981) Towards a Cognitive Redefinition of The Social Group. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive/Current Psychology of Cognition. Vol. 1. No. 2. P. 93—118.
Turner J. H. (2006) American Sociology in Chaos: Differentiation without Integration. The American Sociologist Vol. 37. No. 2. P. 15-29. 1133-1147. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-006-1002-z.
Uçak N. Ö., Al U. (2009) The Differences among Disciplines in Scholarly Communication. A Bibliometric Analysis of Theses. Libri. Vol. 59. No. 3. P. 166—179. https://doi.org/10.1515/libr.2009.016.
White A., Hernandez N. R. (1991) Increasing Field Complexity Revealed Through Article Title Analyses. Journal of the American Society for Information Science. Vol. 42. No. 10. P. 731—734. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199112)42:10<731::AID-ASI6>3.0.CO;2-W.
Yang K. (2019) Comparative Analysis of Publication Patterns in Sciences and Humanities: Based on Bibliometric Data from Korea Citation Index. Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society. Vol. 50. No. 3. P. 23—47. https://doi.org/10.16981/kliss.50.3.201909.23.
Yitzhaki M. (1994) Relation of Title Length of Journal Articles to Number of Authors. Scientometrics. Vol. 30. No. 1. P. 321-332. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02017231.
Yitzhaki M. (2002) Relation of The Title Length of a Journal Article to The Length of The Article. Scientometrics. Vol. 54. No. 3. P. 435—447. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1016038617639.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Monitoring of Public Opinion: Economic and Social Changes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
