Establishing Excellence in Collective Efforts: The Case of Experimental High-Energy Physics

• In Event: Contested Academic Norms - Unraveling Evaluation Discourses and Practices in an Age of “Excellence”: Globalisation and the Making of Academic Excellence

Abstract

Academic researchers are often evaluated and promoted based on their publication record. Motivated by a “cycle of credit” (Latour & Woolgar, 1979), researchers re-invest the credibility gained by publishing results in order to conduct further research. Yet evaluation based on an individual’s publications is obsolete in experimental high-energy physics, where collective authorship has become the norm (Biagioli, 2003; Birnholtz, 2006). In this discipline, the cycle of credit involves the credibility of entire experimental collaborations, some with over 3,000 members. How, then, do individual scientists construct a career within these collective efforts? Communities organised in experimental collaborations such as those located at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have developed alternative practices of evaluation and credit cycles particular to this epistemic culture.
My paper reconstructs these internal and often informal practices of establishing and attributing individual excellence and credibility, based on interviews with physicists working in the LHC collaborations. The experiences of PhD candidates and early-career researchers serve as an entry point for investigation as these groups are particularly exposed to various “regimes of valuation” (Fochler, Felt, & Müller, 2016). While physically located at their home institution, embedded within a national career system, and contributing to a specific research effort within their multi-national collaboration, junior researchers need to establish their worth on several dimensions. Drawing on STS research on epistemic practices, academic careers, and valuation studies, this paper explores how collectively maintained standards of excellence affect knowledge production and career aspirations in the complex working conditions of an experimental collaboration.

Author

• Helene Sorgner, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt | Wien | Graz