Applicant
Pierre Benz
Funded by
SNF Postdoc.Mobility, see Project Page
Duration
2023-2025
During the last decades interdisciplinarity has been increasingly valued by both academic funding agencies and political authorities. Yet, it often seems that the criteria for the evaluation of scientific activity and careers have remained strongly embedded in disciplinary frameworks. This paradox, however, is only apparent, for there is evidence that the two levels may coexist. To study this phenomenon, this research project will focus on the discipline of biology. Recent mobilization of the scientific community in the context of the Covid-19 crisis somehow hides the division of labor at play in the biological sciences, which remain an archipelago of relatively autonomous microcosms in competition for the power to define the problems to be addressed and the methods to be used to solve them.
This project focuses on the mobilities that happen between disciplinary “islands” and their relationships to the distribution of symbolic resources among scholars. These mobilities have two main dimensions: First, the institutional dimension refers to the disciplines as recorded in bibliometric databases, regarding either publications, research projects, or author’s affiliations. Second, the epistemic dimension refers to the degree of epistemological and methodological proximity between concepts or methods that are reported in research papers and projects. The objective is to understand how the two levels interlock: whether they differ only at the margin, or whether there are epistemic communities that transcend institutional disciplines.
This project is structured around the following research questions: (Q1) What is the current epistemic structure of the biological sciences? (Q2) How do epistemic and institutional careers evolve over the life course? (Q3) How does the biographical structure of disciplines echo that of academic and scientific power in biological sciences? To answer these questions, the project innovates by applying a longitudinal perspective to bibliometric and career data drawn from two databases: the Web of Science database for scientific publications and authors, and the Swiss elite database for biographical information on most influential bioscientists in the Swiss context.
The expected impact of the project is threefold. It will add to the theoretical knowledge on the biological sciences by an in-depth study at both institutional and epistemological levels and its relationship with the distribution of power over science, i.e. the power to organize and coordinate scientific activity. It will empirically shed light on the rarely studied issue of when and how disciplinary mobilities occur between two competing research area and provide insight into the construction of disciplines. Methodologically, it will contribute to the literature by implementing a longitudinal perspective to the bibliometric analysis of co-authorship and co-citation using sequence analysis.
