1,722,815 research outputs found
Transparency comes at a serious cost : An agent-based model of open vs. confidential peer review in science
No full textThis paper looks at peer review as a cooperation dilemma between scientists who might follow different strategies of behaviour that are sensitive to contextual conditions more than social predispositions. While Robert Merton suggested that scientists are actors who are socialised to certain, functional social norms, which depended on the historical institutionalisation of the scientific community, Pierre Bourdieu viewed scientists as mere "rational" actors competing individually or in groups for power, recognition and influence. The growing competition in science at all levels, the increasing demand for transparency and accountability of the process by various stakeholders, the disruptive technological innovation applied to the management of the publishing process, as well as the increasing complexity of scientific endeavour today, seem to indicate that these two competing theories cannot be straightforwardly falsified and could even be equally true, depending on specific conditions.
By extending a previous agent-based model of peer review [Squazzoni & Gandelli 2012, Journal of Informetrics], which was built to look at implications of behavioural strategies of scientists on the quality and efficiency of peer review, we tested different conditions that can make scientist strategies intelligible and their consequences measurable, at least in an artificial model.
We first assumed that reviewers could behave randomly (“random” baseline conditions) by providing random evaluations of the author submission quality and measured: (i) system evaluation bias in terms of misallocation of publication, (ii) resources lost by productive authors who were not published although deserved it, and (iii) reviewing expenses, i.e., the level of resources invested in reviewing compared to those invested in publishing at the system level.
We built a second scenario in which reviewer reliability depended on previous success/failure as author (“indirect reciprocity” scenario). In this case, reviewers would follow an “indirect reciprocity” strategies in that, if previously published, they would reciprocate by providing reliable reviews to other authors when casted as reviewers next, whereas, if previously rejected, they would reciprocate by providing unreliable reviews in turn.
In the last scenario, we assumed that peer review was not confidential but open and transparent so that the names of reviewers were visible to authors (as recently advocated by many analysts and supporters of the open peer review model and implemented in some journals like F1000, Economics E-Journal). This implies that scientists could play direct reciprocity strategies, by supporting reviewers who helped them to get published when authors and punishing those one who contributed to their rejection, when they were authors previously.
In the last scenarios, we tested situations in which scientists reciprocate previous experiences not because of previous publication success/failure but by estimating the degree of proximity/distance between the “objective” value of their submission and the rating expressed by the reviewer. In this case, scientists looked at the pertinence of reviewer opinion rather than at their success and so were more critical on the quality of their own work.
Results showed that, unlike common sense, the random walk is not the worst-case scenario in peer review. Indeed, the quality of peer review dramatically decreases when reviewers follow selfish strategies. Furthermore, we found that open and transparent peer review is the worst-case scenario in case reviewers do not look at the pertinence of reviewer opinion when authors previously but reflect only selfishly their publication score.
Although abstract and not directly linked to empirical data, our findings help to discuss implications of Bourdieunian competitive spirits in the scientific community and indicate that Mertonian social norms of the scientific community must not be taken for granted but reinforced by exploring new rewards and sanctioning systems
Coworking and Social Support among Peers: A Multiplex Network Study of a Coworking Space
No full textThis work aims at understanding how social support ties form from economic exchange. We studied a multiplex network of instrumental and expressive relationships in a group of independent workers who occasionally collaborate for business purposes.
We tested (i) the effect of professional collaborations on the formation of support ties; (ii) the role of business-related trust as a mechanism underlying this relationship; (iii) the endogenous effects of reciprocity and closure on the formation of a support network.
We collected network and demographic data through a questionnaire, which was personally administered to all the 29 freelance workers who share an ICT- focused coworking space located in Brescia, North-western Italy. This group was selected because the coworking space did not have any formal organizational structure providing incentives to professional collaboration between its members. This was an ideal context for disentangling the spontaneous formation of social ties from economic interactions. The data collection followed a 3-month ethnographic pre-study, which helped to understand the context, obtain full participation to the survey, and calibrate the questionnaire.
Network data have been collected by means of the name-generator approach. Social support was measured by asking each subject potential whom they would turn to in case of need of material and emotional help for non work-related issues. A professional collaboration matrix resulted from the integration of data on incoming and outgoing flows of transactions, weighted by the related satisfaction level. In order to test the role of business-related trust, subjects were asked to cite trustworthy people as potential business partners. Finally, data about covariate networks were collected as control factors: advice-seeking within the previous 12 months, friendship, and previous acquaintance. We also gathered data about sociodemographic and business-related characteristics of the actors (age, gender, education, seniority, business revenues) and measured their baseline levels of generalized trust and group identification.
We modeled social support together with trust by applying a family of multivariate exponential random graph models, controlling for actor-relation effects and exogenous effects yielded by covariate networks.
We found that reciprocity was not essential for the formation of support ties. Conversely, we found a positive effect of path closure and a non-significant effect of cyclic closure. This suggests the emergence of local clusters where coworkers provide support by following transitive paths. Together with a strong negative effect of indegree centralization, our results show a globally decentralized flow of support which clusters locally around emergent hierarchies.
With regards to multivariate effects, collaborating with another freelancer seems to increase the likelihood of developing expectations of support, regardless of the level of satisfaction with the business partner. Finally, trusting another freelancer for business purposes tends to foster expectations of support, also controlling for the other covariate networks.
In conclusion, our work suggests that non-instrumental support is likely to align with trust in economic exchanges, while the outcome of a collaboration seems to be less relevant. Moreover, our study provides an interesting insight on the way informal hierarchical structures emerge among peers
Simulating Knowledge Dynamics in Innovation Networks, N. Gilbert, P. Ahrweile, A. Pyka (eds.)
No full text
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Methodological Individualism between Explanation and Theory Building
No full textThe present work aims at criticising the foundationalist assumptions of Methodological
Individualism (MI) in the social sciences by showing that they depend on one, but notnecessarily the only, conception of the role of explanation in the construction of overall
sociological theories. Philosophical arguments have been supplemented with a bird’s-eye
survey of contemporary social research in order to identify such conceptions in common
strands of empirical research. This method tries to comply with the need for a tighter
interaction between philosophy of science and working social science [8, 9].
In current social research, a sophisticated restatement of MI, known as “structural indi-vidualism”, has been introduced by so-called Analytical Sociology (AS), which is gaining
more and more popularity among social scientists [5]. The main idea that characterisesAS is that explanations of social phenomena ought consist of detecting and detailing
the mechanisms that generate them, that is, by referring to individuals, their properties,
actions, and relations to one another [4]—the “social cogs and wheels” of the mechanism
[2]. As such, AS shares with more traditional versions of MI [12] the requirement thatall acceptable explanations of social phenomena be reduced to individuals and their
properties.
Sofar,mostdebateonMIhingedonestablishingthemostadequatelevelofexplanation
[11], either by deriving MI from social ontology or by explicitly defining causation—and
hence explanations—in terms of individual action. In contrast, we argue that MI could be
better assessed by shifting the focus from ontology and epistemology to the nature and
scope of sociological theories. Reductions to the individual level of the kind advocated by
methodological individualists crucially presuppose a particular conception of the role of
explanations in the construction of more general theories which is but one of the possible
alternatives. One of these is the model of explanation that, we contend, underlies many
surveyed empirical studies which draw on different sociological frameworks, such as
comparative-historical and comparative-institutional research programmes. Explanations
of this kind seek to establish causal relationships between the occurrence of a particular
event (the
explanandum
) and the earlier occurrence of certain historical or institutionalphenomena (the
explanantia
) without necessarily further reducing any of them to their
components. This model of explanation, we argue, is functional to building sociological
theories that make abstraction from the particular historical or institutional contextsof study in order to identify recurrent patterns of causation between general types of phenomena. Examples from comparative political economy provide a case in point:
although case-study based, such research provides social scientific explanations applicableto all instances of the same phenomenon—such as, say, the emergence of a certain variety
of educational system in Western countries with coordinated market economies [1].
According to AS, on the contrary, to explain a social phenomenon is to identify a social
mechanism. The stylized “social cogs and wheels” that make up the mechanism resultfrom the dissection of the
explanandum
into its constituent entities and their abstraction
fromthoseelementsconsideredtobeoflesserimportance[4]. Therefore, whatmechanism- based explanations actually refer to is a stylized version of the phenomenon; mechanisms
can thus be said to define an entire class of phenomena analogous to the
explanandum
.
Indeed, to the extent that mechanisms are made up of stylized entities, they might as
well be extended to explain phenomena belonging to different classes, insofar as thesecan be reduced to the same stylized constituents. This model of explanation supportssociological theories whose goal is to build models of causal mechanisms so general asto “cut across” the different types of phenomena and be therefore applied to explain
events of very different kinds. Individual-level reductions, in short, ought not be seen as
attempts to arrive at more exhaustive explanations of particular phenomena—or classes
of phenomena—than non-reduced explanations. Quite on the contrary, reductions of thiskind are best understood as the building blocks for more general theories whose scope liesin their abstractness and hence in their broad applicability. This argument is corroborated
by the actual analysis of various empirical studies run by AS scholars in order to explain
particular historical events by means of general models of mechanisms. Among the most
revealing, “rational imitation” models of mechanisms [4] have been extensively applied
to explain phenomena as diverse as the emergence of social movements [3, 6] and the
participation into a bank run [10].
In conclusion, reductions of explanations to the individual level—like those advocated byMI—arejustifiedbytheneedtobuildsociologicaltheoriesthatembracehetereogeneousvarieties of phenomena. Yet since this conception of sociological theories is far from beingthe only one, the methodological individualist assumption that all explanations ought be
altogether reduced to the individual level amounts to a form of what some authors [7]
aptly defined as “microchauvinism”
The shadow of reciprocity on confidential vs. open peer review: An agent-based model
No full textThis paper presents an agent-based model of peer review that looks at potential con-sequences of reciprocity strategies by scientists on the quality and efficiency of the process. We analyzed scientist strategies in two conditions: (i) when peer review is confidential and anony-mous; (ii) when peer review is open. We built three scenarios through which we manipulated reviewer behavior: reliable (reviewers always cooperate by providing pertinent opinion), unre-liable (reviewers always defect by providing biased opinion) and strategic (reviewers overvalue other’s work when previously published and vice versa) reviewers. Results showed that the effect of reciprocity strategies on the quality of peer review might be detrimental. This is even more dramatic when peer review is open, as scientists could play Tit-for-Tat direct reciprocity against other colleagues, which may dramatically biases their personal judgement
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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