Polycephalous Science: What Paratexts Can Tell Us About the Social and Structural Dynamics of Intellectual Collaboration

by Blaise Cronin

SLIS, Indiana University

Date

Friday, January 14, 2005

Time

4:00 p.m. — 5:00 p.m.

Place

Informatics Building 107

Abstract

Numerous studies have documented the growth in international, inter-institutional, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral scientific collaboration since the second half of the 20th century. The internationalization of science is a now a given: ‘Scientific research in our time is either global or ceases to be scientific’ (Castells, 2000). Various theories have been put forward to explain the growth in distributed co-production in both ‘little’ and ‘big science’ (Price, 1986), including the following: resource optimization and the professionalization of science (Beaver & Rosen, 1978; Eaton, 1951), functional explanations of collaborative behavior (Wray, 2002), rates of return to specialization (Laband & Tollison, 2000), preferential attachment among productive researchers (Wagner & Leydesdorff, 2004).

The most accessible measures of the trend are co-authorship rates, data on which can be mined from online/web-based resources such as Web of Science or CiteSeer. Co-authorship rates have increased across the board, most dramatically in science, technology and medicine. Collaboration is the norm for junior researchers and Nobel laureates alike (Zuckerman, 1977). In some fields (high-energy physics, biomedicine) large-scale, multi-institutional collaborations have led to the linked phenomena of ‘hyperauthorship’ (Cronin, 2002) and ‘mass recognition’ (Morris et al., 2005), though with quite different epistemological consequences. In an age of ‘post-academic science’ (Ziman, 2000) authorship is being at once diffused and corporatized (Biagiolio, 2003). There have been proposals in the biomedical community to retire the concept of the author in favor of contributors and guarantors in an effort to address the problem of ‘ghost’ and ‘gift’ authorship (Rennie, Yank, & Emanuel, 1997).

In addition to co-authorship rates — the most accessible indicators of ‘cognitive partnerships’ (Nersessian et al., 2003) — there are complementary, though largely ignored, indicators of sub-authorship collaboration: acknowledgments (Patel, 1973; Heffner, 1981; Cronin, 1995). The acknowledgment has established itself as a constitutive paratextual (Genette, 1997) feature of the modern journal article. It is a rich source of insight into the myriad genres of informal assistance and networked interaction that are imperceptibly inscribed in academic texts (Cronin, 2005), evidence of — to use the language of Actor-Network Theory (e.g., Callon & Latour, 1981) — ‘enrolled actants.’ The acknowledgment documents patterns of ‘trusted assessorship’ (Mullins, 1973) and provides us with a means of exploring ‘the sociology of the invisible’ (Star, 1991; Strauss, 1985). Developments in automatic acknowledgment extraction and parsing (Giles & Councill, 2005) will help reveal the socio-structural interdependence of scientists and also facilitate more fine-grained, and more equitable, measurement of scholarly contributions. Meadows’ (1974) ‘silent scientists’ may finally be heard.

Biography

Blaise Cronin is the Rudy Professor of Information Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he has been dean of the School of Library and Information Science for 13 years. Previously he held the Chair of Information Science at the University of Strathclyde in the UK. He has published extensively on scholarly communication, scientometrics and collaboration in science (e.g., The Citation Process, 1984; The Scholar’s Courtesy, 1995; The Hand of Science, 2005) and is Editor of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. He holds an MA from Trinity College Dublin, a PhD and DSSc from the Queen’s University of Belfast and a DLitt (honoris causa) from Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh.

Colloquium Provided By:

the School of Informatics