Do states make scientific fields?

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: SKAT and the State

Abstract

Do states make scientific fields? States regulate the institutions of science, govern the dynamics of professionalization in scientific disciplines, and set ethical, theoretical and empirical standards on scientists’ work. They also orient the substantive priorities of scientists through explicit incentives such as public funding, or through tacit incentives like the emulation of research in evidence-based policy. Through their expert bureaucracies, states also directly influence scientific knowledge by engaging in the production, curation, interpretation and dissemination of research. Extant research thus documents various mechanisms through which states shape the content of science by orienting its substantive priorities, normative commitments and political inclinations. Yet, researchers have seldom looked at the role of states, and especially expert bureaucracies, in shaping the structure and boundaries of scientific fields.

We explore the role of the state in shaping scientific fields through an empirical study of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), an agency that has outsized prominence in the biological sciences both within the United States and globally. Our project analyzes the impact that CDC-published scientific articles have on the structure and substance of the subfields to which they contribute. We derive a corpus of 16,069 CDC publications from OpenAlex (Priem & Orr 2022) and identify the subset of all publications within the same scientific domain as each of them. Our analysis uses time-series cocitation networks within each of these domains to identify the effects of CDC publications on the structure of the subfields. Preliminary findings suggest that publications from the CDC incentivize scientists to synchronize the framing of subsequent publications to those of the CDC’s articles, decrease the diversity of ideas in a scientific domain, and promote publications that are in line with the state-sponsored presentation.

Authors

• Peter McMahan, McGill University

• Gabriel Venne Lévesque, McGill University