Universalism and global science [electronic resource] : how scientists and scientific knowledge traverse the world

Science is presumed to be a global enterprise, with collaborations spanning continents, scientists traversing the world to further their careers, and data repositories open to scientists in any corner of the globe. This supposedly universal and global enterprise is, however, juxtaposed by nationalized social, economic, and political influences. Although the methods and frameworks scientists use to evaluate the natural world ought to be understood and evaluated in the same way regardless of context (Merton 1970, 1973; Zuckerman 1989; Cole 1992), national boundaries and international influence shape a presumably global process. I argue that the nation-state is perhaps the most influential organizational unit in modern science, enveloping nearly all aspects of social, economic, and political life. It can implicitly and explicitly shape science in terms of what research foci are important and are central to wider disciplinary conversations. Yet, scientific fields are quite diverse in terms of what they study, how they are structured, and even their own culture that renders a common schema and language to evaluate and synthesize new knowledge. Some fields are presumed to be universal (Merton 1973), like physics or chemistry: free from subjectivity, bias, and conducted in the same manner everywhere with collaborations spanning continents. What remains unanswered by current research is how can we capture the landscape of global science given the nature of academic fields, the influence of nation-states on them, and the flow of scientists and knowledge across borders. To that end, my dissertation seeks to empirically answer this question with the closest proxy to ready-made scientific knowledge to date. Specifically, I apply computational linguistic techniques to (1) the title and abstract texts of scientific publications from over 30 million papers found in over 230 subject codes (SCs) that reflect journals canonical to fields and (2) the publication careers of nearly 10,000 U.S.-trained scientists as they traverse national borders. These data come from a unique version of Thomson Reuter's Web of Science (WoS) and ProQuest's UMI Dissertation Database, together curating one of the most comprehensive observatories of global scientific publications. Computational linguistic techniques, like topic models, cosine similarity scores, and entropy measures, offer one of the closest proxies to empirically capturing scientific knowledge incarnate from these data. My dissertation is organized as three interconnected chapters, written as solo-authored journal article, to systemically and systematically explore the structure and influence of global science. In each chapter, I capture an empirical, quantitative measure of how the research foci of scientists, countries, and global disciplinary fields are organized, change over time, and influence one another. I find that certain fields are much more distinct and local at the national level, where wide swaths of institutional and professional science are organized. They are also more susceptible to international influence. High paradigmatic sciences that enjoy a higher degree of consensus (or are more universal in scope) are uniform regardless of country in that they emphasize the same research foci. They are also less susceptible to influence from other countries in terms of what research scientists in their country emphasize. Finally, a scientist's intellectual distance from their initial training over their careers and towards integrating into wider disciplinary fields with global mobility is predicated on the universal nature of these conversations.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: McFarland Daniel (Daniel A.) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Powell Walter W. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Parigi Paolo
Ramirez Francisco O. advisor. Thesis advisor