Daniel Steinbock

Sometimes the social reality of science raises its ugly head: that we scientists aren’t all simply altruistic seekers of knowledge, always giving credit where credit is due, but that we have self-interest and motivations of attaining prestige, career advancement and the like.

For this reason and more, I have high hopes for the work Marko Rodriguez is doing around the scholarly communication process:

The general purpose of the scholarly communication process is to support the creation and dissemination of ideas within the scientific community. [...] This paper describes an associative network composed of multiple scholarly artifacts that can be used as a medium for supporting the scholarly communication process.

- A Multi-Graph to Support the Scholarly Communication Process

My hope is that emerging scientific research tools such as these will help support a shift to a more meritocratic social system in science, where the incentives to research and publish are more closely aligned to the “true aims of science”. Specifically, I would hope that the future network structure of the scientific communication process will represent more a knowledge structure than a social structure.

A paper’s authors, acknowledgements and references are all relational data which point to people or artifacts which gave some contribution to the finished product. It’s for inconsistent, socially-constructed reasons that we separate and prioritize these resources. Like when decisions about who gets the first author slot are based on seniority instead of contribution.

Authors, references and acknowledgements are rightly distinguished as different types of resources but they all share the value of being a relational input to a paper. It seems to me that the network created by, for example, a single ranked list of each paper’s human and artifactual inputs, would more faithfully represent the living knowledge network instead of merely the social structure of the authors (coauthorship net) or the relatedness of topics (citation net). For instance, a reference may have been more valuable to the paper’s creation than one of the five co-authors, or an acknowledged party could have been more informative than many of the thirty references.

If the true aim of science is the quest for knowledge, not the quest for tenure, then it makes sense to give credit where credit is due, and accurately weight the importance of all information inputs to a given paper.