“From the Bureaucratic Virtuoso to Scientific Misconduct: Robert K. Merton, Eugene Garfield, and Goal Displacement in Science”

Alex Csiszar (Harvard University)

This paper outlines a history of perceived abuses and dysfunctions of scientific publishing from the early nineteenth century to the 1980s, with a strong focus on the introduction of citation analysis as a measure of scholarly merit in the 1960s and 1970s. It explores the relationship between the development of tools for evaluating scientific impact by Eugene Garfield’s Institute for Scientific Information and the development of post-war sociology of science in the United States. During the 1960s, the sociologist Robert K. Merton applied the concept of goal displacement – which he originally developed in the context of the sociology of bureaucracy – to describe dysfunctional consequences of the reward system in science. In doing, Merton was formalizing and transforming what were by then long-standing concerns about the abuses of scientific publishing that stretched back to the late nineteenth century. As Garfield developed the Journal Impact Factor and other potential evaluative tools, Merton became a close advisor who insisted on the fundamental importance of the role that such metrics might play in altering scientists’ behaviour. The paper will argue that metrical misconduct ought not to be viewed as a distant by-product of attempts to measure scientific productivity, but as a central factor in their implementation and even in their acceptance. Finally, it will suggest that much current academic debate about scientific metrics has remained largely within the structural-functionalist mode of Merton, with the unfortunate result that technical questions about measuring scientific achievement have been divorced from considerations of the politics of knowledge.

“When Medical Men Disappoint Institutions”

Marie-Andrée Jacob (Keele University)

Drawing on archival material from the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Royal College of Physicians (RCP) I examine how the British state became interested in scientific controversies, and in turn how the terminology of misconduct became a way to speak about what is seen as deviant, fake, or simply poor research. I examine how sponsors and early self-regulatory professional bodies expressed their institutional disappointment with what they perceived as dubious science on the part of medical men, and how this disappointment got translated into textual forms between 1850 and 1970. I also examine the way that the conceptualization, investigation and occasional punishment of malpractice functioned to amend the expectations of medical research. There is no direct historical equivalent to the contemporary forms of ‘correction’ and ‘retraction’ from the research record, but reports of the RCP’s Censor’s Board from the nineteenth century could provide a meaningful reading of censoring as an analogy to help better understand the contemporary work of retraction. The historical value of looking at those who have raised allegations of ‘misconduct’ does not depend on them being right, and I am not interested in drawing a line between proper and improper ways to critique scientists. Instead my attention will be focused on tracing the conceptions of legitimacy held by those who expressed disappointment with, or otherwise censured, medical men in matters of their professional and research practice.

“Grey is the New Black: Misconduct and the Evolution of Scholarly Media”

Alessandro Delfanti (University of Toronto)

The digitization of preprint archives and the emergence of social media for academics have contributed to the renewed importance of grey literature, i.e. content that is not published in peer-reviewed journals or in other officially sanctioned formats. Preprint papers, conference slides, white papers, and data publications are some of the objects that circulate in these spaces. As they provide room for the circulation of alternative scholarly content and become core communicative environments, digital services such as arXiv (physics and mathematics), biorXiv (life sciences), SSRN (law), or academia.edu (social sciences) tend to transform academic labour and affect the distribution of power in academia. In this paper I present cases that highlight how these spaces blur the contours of scientific misconduct. In particular, I will focus on cases of doppelgänger publishing venues, spam practices, bot-generated content that emerge in response to the role of digital services for the circulation of grey literature within scholarly communities. This will provide a vantage point to understand how efforts to construct and police the boundaries of science change over time and intertwine with technological evolution. We should not take at face value the rhetoric of digitally-mediated openness that has become hegemonic in contemporary scholarship.