ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Science as Schistosomiasis. From the ‘Ecology of Medical Literature’ to Infodemics.

• In Event: Epidemiology Unbound 3

English Abstract

In 1972, the physician Kenneth Warren and the library scientist William Goffman published a paper to propose an epidemiological approach to the exponential proliferation of scientific and medical literature. Adapting a mathematical model developed to characterise the 4-factorial distribution cycle of schistosomiasis, a disease caused by a parasitic worm, the authors proposed to think of scientific literature in strict analogy: the author as host, the manuscript as infective embryo, the journal as snail and the published paper as a larva infective to hosts. At the heart of their endeavour stood the hope to improve the recognition of papers of good quality – highly infectious – so that overall exposure of authors could be reduced.
Warren and Goffman were not the only ones seeking to transfer epidemiological approaches into the understanding of knowledge distribution. Perhaps most prominently, Eugene Garfield of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) referred retrospectively to his own work on citation-based ranking as the ‘epidemiology of science’ (1987).
This paper explores the influence and significant impact of epidemiological reasoning in the emerging information science from the 1950s onwards to show how infrastructures such as Garfield’s citation index made epidemiological approaches to the ecology of medical literature doable – and profitable. However, the paper will argue that these epidemiological approaches to knowledge distribution have had only little bearing on current debates around infodemics, which appear to reserve metaphors of contagious spread to misinformation, rumours, and other unscientific genres.

Author

• Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh