Tower of Babel or Scientific Esperanto? Mapping the Geography of Intellectual Cultures with Texts and Citations

• In Event: 3546 - Sociology of Science

Abstract

This paper explores how the geographic distribution of knowledge in scientific fields relates to features of the field’s intellectual culture: specifically, why what scientists study is consistent across nations in some fields and, as I discover, nationally distinct in others. I explore this relationship at scale by applying a computational linguistic technique called a Labeled LDA topic model to nearly 30 million academic papers, across 187 fields, and almost a quarter century of published peer-reviewed journal publications. I argue these texts are the medium of academic communication, contestation, and reification that represent a field’s knowledge base, and the citations embedded in these texts symbolically reflect how researchers are acculturated by their fields. The knowledge found in published texts for fields like physics, math, or chemistry is generally not unique to one particular nation and is consistent across borders. However, the knowledge found in published texts that should be unique to the concerns of a particular nation in fields like economics and meteorology are, in fact, consistent across borders. This is because researchers are guided by a highly cohesive intellectual culture that is consistent across national borders. However, knowledge does surprisingly vary by countries in universally-framed fields like cybernetics and aerospace engineering, as well as in nationally-oriented fields like sociology and political science. This is because researchers in these fields are guided by a less cohesive intellectual culture, where the influence of national borders is pronounced. I find that despite the vastly different subject matter studied by sociologists, cybernetic researchers, and aerospace engineers, they all tend to cite other researchers from within their own borders more frequently. By contrast, physicists, economists, and meteorologists are guided by a highly cohesive intellectual culture and are not bound to cite others from within their borders.

Author

• Charles Jonathan Gomez, City University of New York, Queens College