CHAPTER 14

RESEARCH QUALITY, BIBLIOMETRICS AND THE REPUBLIC OF SCIENCE

I'll burn my books! Ah, Mephistophilis. −Faustus Christopher , The Tragicall History of D. Faustus1

Nothing is more contrary to the progress of knowledge than mystery.... If it happens that an invention favorable to the progress of the arts and sciences comes to my knowledge, I burn to divulge it; that is my mania. Born communicative as much as it is possible for a man to be, it is too bad that I was not born more inventive; I would have told my ideas to the first comer. Had I but one secret for all my stock in trade, it seems to me that if the general good should require the publication of it, I should prefer to die honestly on a street corner, my back against a post, than let my fellow men suffer. −Denis Diderot2

IDEOLOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE3 It is only since the 1960s with the development of research evaluation and increasing sophistication of bibliometrics that it has been possible to map the emerging economy of global science, at least on a comparative national and continental basis. The Science Citation Index provides bibliographic and citational information from 3,700 of the world’s scientific and technical journals covering over one hundred disciplines.4 The expanded index available in an online version covers more than 5,800 journals. Comparable ‘products’ in the social sciences (SSCI) and humanities (A&HCI) cover, respectively, bibliographic information from 1,700 journals in fifty disciplines and 1,130 journals. Additionally, the Web of Science covers more than 5,800 scientific journals.5 Thomson’s ‘scientific products’ provide ‘a total information solution is one that enables users to effortlessly navigate between essential research information sources including …Web of Knowledge.., full-text documents hosted by primary publishers, a growing list of key databases, and other options such as online public access catalogs’ (my emphasis). I begin with a quotation from Dr Faustus in Marlowe’s play for what must appear as obvious reasons especially in face of ‘total information solutions.’ Faustus today could have sold The Web of Knowledge to Mephistophilis and saved his soul. The play trades on the theme of knowledge in its relation to sin,

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redemption and damnation at the heart of Christianity’s understanding of the world and also the conflict between medieval and renaissance values, knowledge and power as corrupting forces, magic and the supernatural, and the divided nature of man. The story of Faustus then exemplifies the new spirit of inquiry that characterizes Renaissance science and the intellectual ambition for ultimate knowledge and the power it brings against a specifically Christian ideology that warns about the dangers of seeking forbidden knowledge. We must remember that Marlowe was a child of the English Renaissance and the Reformation, a period called by Frances Yates ‘the false dawn of the Enlightenment,’ where public knowledge traditions were still weak and there was much suppression, delay and suspicion. Marlowe shared his birth year (1564) with both Galileo and with Shakespeare. It was a very dangerous time to express any kind of interest in the new scientific discoveries that were being discussed by intellectuals all over Europe. We might refer to this era as being characterized by the ideology of secret, forbidden or esoteric knowledge. Sir and the young Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, together led a group of intellectuals, mostly noblemen, courtiers and educated commoners, that included mathematicians, astronomers, voyagers who had explored the New World, geographers, philosophers and poets. They formed an esoteric club nicknamed ‘The School of Night’ which met secretly to discuss this forbidden knowledge, always ‘behind closed doors.’ Marlowe became a member of this close circle, who were called Free-Thinkers and were all stigmatized as ‘Atheists’ in order to blacken them in the eyes of the ignorant. Francis Bacon’s (1561-1626) utopian inductive philosophy of science (The Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, The New Atlantis) strongly influenced by alchemy and magick but also based on observation and experiment, became the guiding ethos of the Royal Society established in 1660 as ‘The Empire of Learning’ led by Robert Boyle, Sir Christopher Wren, Sir Robert Moray. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society became the first academic journal, its first edition edited by Henry Oldenburg in 1665. Peer review was introduced as a practice of the journal and developed as a set of academic practices thereafter. Denis Diderot with Jean Le Rond d'Alembert was the chief editor of the L'Encyclopédie which was published between 1751 and 1772 in 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of engravings, representing perhaps one of the greatest achievements of learning of the Enlightenment. The Encyclopédie outlined the then present state of knowledge about the sciences, arts, and crafts, and was explicitly designed to make the knowledge possessed by the few accessible to the many. Most of the 71, 818 articles in the Encyclopédie were written by Diderot and d'Alembert but also included prominent thinkers of the day including Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Baron d'Holbach, Necker, Turgot, and Buffon. The notion of the encyclopedia, originally from a Greek word meaning literally ‘a general education,’ represents the attempt to collect all of the world’s knowledge in a single system and arguably dates from the 37 volumed work of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia in the first century CE. Many other attempts at this total knowledge system followed: Cassiodorus’ Institutiones (560 CE), the first catholic

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