Abstract
In order to investigate the nature of Merton's contribution to the sociology of science, I examine how his work has been cited by groups of authors who are highly co-cited with Merton. The groups differ substantially both in terms of which of Merton's publications they cite, and how they cite them. This implies that subsequent scholars have found Merton's sociology of science work valuable for many different reasons. This pattern is probably true for Merton's sociological oeuvre as a whole, and suggests that scholarly preeminence in the social sciences consists of making contributions that many different groups of scholars judge to be useful in justifying the importance of their own research.
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Notes and References
See T. F. Gieryn, Relativist/constructivist programmes in the sociology of science, Social Studies of Science, 12 (1982) 279-297.
R. K. Merton, Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A chapter in the sociology of science, American Sociological Review, 22 (1957) 635-659; H. Zuckerman, R. K. Merton, Patterns of evaluation in science: Institutionalisation, structure and functions of the referee system, Minerva, 9 (1971) 66–100; H. Zuckerman, R. K. Merton, Age, aging, and age structure in science, In: M. W. Riley, M. Johnson, A. Foner (Eds), Aging and Society, Vol. 3. New York, Russell Sage, 1972.
For example, the various editions of Merton's Social Theory and Social Structure, probably the most cited collection of essays in sociology, include his early papers in the sociology of science.
R. K. Merton, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Chicago, Univ. Chicago Press, 1973.
H. G. Small, Cited documents as concept symbols, Social Studies of Science, 8 (1978) 327-340.
To construct this map, White used the AuthorLink system to search for citations to Merton in journals under the headings of “library and information science” and “history and philosophy of science” in the Institute of Scientific Information's Social Scisearch (the online Social Science Citation Index). It was necessary to restrict the search to these two sets of journals in order to focus on Merton's work in the sociology of science. If, for example, the search had included all sociology journals covered by the SSCI, Merton's substantial contributions outside the sociology of science would have overwhelmed his work inside that smaller area. Next, White determined the 24 authors who had the most co-citations with Merton. Finally, using the co-citation counts among those authors, he constructed a Pathfinder network (PFNET) with AuthorLink to represent the structure of the co-citations. Lines in a PFNET represent those co-citation linkages that are the strongest in the local regions of the network. For a fuller discussion of AuthorLink and these procedures, see X. Lin, H. D. White, J. Buzydlowski, Real-time author co-citation mapping for online searching, Information Processing and Management, 39 (2003) 689-706. Note that because Derek Price was frequently cited as both Price, DJ and Price, DJD, he is represented twice in Figure 1.
B. Latour, S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, Beverly Hills, CA, Sage, p. 24.
B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ. Press, p. 263.
B. Latour, When things strike back: a possible contribution of “science studies” to the social sciences, British Journal of Sociology, 51 (2000), 111.
R. K. Merton, Sociology of knowledge, In: G. Gurvitch, W. E. Moore (Eds), Twentieth Century Sociology, New York: Philosophical Library, 1945. For an example of this citation, see H. M. Collins, The sociology of scientific knowledge, Annual Review of Sociology, 9 (1983) 267.
R. K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, In: Osiris: Studies on the History and Philosophy of Science, Bruges, Belgium, Saint Catherine Press, 1938. For an example of this citation, see S. Shapin, Here and everywhere: Sociology of scientific knowledge, Annual Review of Sociology, 21 (1995) 295.
See S. Shapin, Understanding the Merton thesis, Isis, 79 (1988) 594-605; S. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996.
Making this kind of claim is a common rhetorical strategy in the social science literature. See C. Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1988, pp. 278-288.
T. S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977, pp. 115-118. In this commentary Kuhn also points out that the Merton Thesis could be attributed to Weber. If true, this would make it another case supporting “Stigler's Law of Eponymy” (“No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”). See S. Stigler, Statistics on the Table, Cambridge, MA, Harvard Univ. Press, 1999, pp. 277–290.
Kuhn, op. cit. note 14, pp. 121-122. T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (2nd Edition), Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970, pp. 176–178.
E. Garfield, Citation Indexing: Its Theory and Application in Science, Technology, and Humanities, New York: Wiley, 1979, pp. xiv, 247, 255.
R. K. Merton, On the Garfield input to the sociology of science: A retrospective collage, In: B. Cronin, H. B. Atkins (Eds), The Web of Knowledge: A Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Garfield, Medford, NJ, Information Today, 2000.
See D. J. D. Price, Little Science, Big Science...And Beyond, New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1986.
For example, B. Cronin, The Citation Process, London, Taylor and Graham, 1984; G. S. McMillian, F. Narin, D. L. Deeds, An analysis of the critical role of public science in innovation: The case of biotechnology, Research Policy, 29 (2000) 3.; M. H. MacRoberts, B. R. MacRoberts, Problems of citation analysis, Scientometrics, 36 (1996) 439.
For example, J. R. Cole, S. Cole, Social Stratification in Science, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973; H. Zuckerman, Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States, New York, Free Press, 1977.
J. Ben-David, The Scientist's Role in Society, Englewook Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1971; W. O. Hagstrom, The Scientific Community, New York, Basic Books, 1965.
D. Crane, Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972.
W. D. Garvey, Communication: The Essence of Science, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1979.
A typical example of this citation strategy is J. S. Long, M. F. Fox, Scientific careers: Universalism and particularism, Annual Review of Sociology, 21 (1995) 45-46.
R. K. Merton, Singletons and multiples in scientific discovery, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 105 (1961) 483-485.
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Hargens, L.L. What is Mertonian sociology of science?. Scientometrics 60, 63–70 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SCIE.0000027309.30756.6c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SCIE.0000027309.30756.6c