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A METHODOLOGY FOR STUDYING FIELD DIFFERENCES IN SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION - EXPLAINING OPENNESS AND SHARING IN TWO SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITIES IN THE CHEMICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Theresa Velden August 2011 c 2011 Theresa Velden ALL RIGHTS RESERVED A METHODOLOGY FOR STUDYING FIELD DIFFERENCES IN SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION - EXPLAINING OPENNESS AND SHARING IN TWO SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITIES IN THE CHEMICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES Theresa Velden, Ph.D. Cornell University 2011 This dissertation is about differences in communication practices across scientific fields, and how to study those differences. It explores how differences in communicative behavior of scientists can be traced back to differences in the kind of research they are doing. The focus is on one aspect of scientific communication in particular: how openly do research teams within a research specialty share scientific knowledge? This question is of particular relevance vis-a-vis` the World Wide Web’s innovative potential to connect people and information worldwide. For the sciences this translates into an increased immediacy with which scientists can access and exchange scientific knowledge, as well as new ways of (re)evaluating, combining, and mining data. The methodological approach developed in this study combines qualitative (ethnographic) and quantitative (network analytic) methods. This approach supports scaling-up nuanced local ethnographic field studies to the aggregate level of research specialties for comparison between fields. Behavioral patterns are captured and quanti- fied through structural analyses of publication networks that are constructed from the accumulated 20-year publication output of a research specialty. In turn ethnographic observations provide validation and interpretation for the quantitative measures used and help further refine the network analysis. Making use of this methodology a comparative study of two scientific communities in the chemical and physical sciences is conducted that identify a broad range of rel- evant aspects of research culture that feed into the field specific propensity for openness and sharing in scientific communities. Based on these findings an analytic framework is derived to support future comparative studies of openness and sharing in the sciences. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Theresa Velden was born in 1970 in Bonn, Germany. She first experienced and thoroughly enjoyed meeting people from all over the world in an English speak- ing academic environment during an academic year she spent abroad in Ireland. In that year, 1994/1995, she was supported by an ERASMUS scholarship to ob- tain a graduate level introduction into Einstein’s general relativity theory at the University College Dublin. In 1997, she graduated from Bielefeld University with a degree in physics after completing a diploma thesis on the dynamics of pressure-free matter in general relativity under the supervision of Jurgen¨ Ehlers at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute). When interning in the mid 1990’s and later freelancing for the popular science television program ‘Quarks & Co.’, she started using the Internet and was fasci- nated by the potential of the emerging World Wide Web to connect information and people globally. To further pursue this interest, in 1998, she took up the position of Managing Editor of the new online journal ‘Living Reviews in relativity’ at the Albert Einstein Institute. Based on her experience in developing web-based information services for scientists, in 2001 she was offered the position of Executive Director with the challenge to build up the Heinz Nixdorf Center for Information Management in the Max Planck Society. Her work there helped develop the strategy of the Max Planck Society for realizing the vision of the 2003 Berlin Declaration for Open Access and contributed to laying the foundation for the Max Planck Digital Library that was eventually founded in 2007. Following her passion for research she left her executive post in 2005 and joined the Information Science PhD program at Cornell University. The academic results of the six years that followed are presented in this dissertation. iii To my parents. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The work presented in this thesis could not have been accomplished without the many students and scientists that I met and interviewed. I am indebted to their openness, and their kindness for taking the time to talk amidst busy work schedules. I am equally grateful to the research group leaders who gave me their time and welcomed me into their research groups as an observant visitor. I thank the astute mediator who helped me initiate these connections. To pro- tect anonymity of the study participants these individuals will have to remain unnamed. I am especially indebted to my thesis advisor Carl Lagoze for his intellectual curiosity, openness, and unwavering support at a personal and professional level that helped this work come into being. Further, I enjoyed working with him and Asif-ul Haque who brought their expertise into our collaboration on how to extract meaningful patterns from publication networks. I also want to thank the members of my special committee, Paul Ginsparg, Rachel Prentice, and Stephen Hilgartner. I appreciate their academic generosity in taking an interest in and supporting a dissertation project that pushes on established com- fort zones of either quantitatively or qualitatively oriented research and scholarship. Further, I am acknowledging funding from the National Science Foundation and from Microsoft Corporation. I was fortunate to have received a NSF ’Doc- toral Thesis Improvement Grant’ in 2009 that supported a fair amount of travel. This research was further supported by IIS-738543 SGER: Advancing the State of eChemistry, by DUE-0840744 NSDL Technical Network Services: A Cyberin- frastructure Platform for STEM Education, by OCI-1025679, and by Microsoft Corporation through the project ORE-based eChemistry. v Last but not least, obrigada amigo, for supporting me through the frantic final phase of putting it all together, first in my mind and then on paper. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch.............................. iii Dedication................................... iv Acknowledgements..............................v Table of Contents............................... vii 1 Introduction1 2 Background6 2.1 Scientific Research as a Collective Process and the Role of Scien- tific Communication..........................6 2.2 Field Differences in Scientific Communication and Collaboration 12 2.3 Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches to Study Field Differences in Scientific Communication........... 16 3 Research Questions and Methodological Approach 19 3.1 Research Questions........................... 19 3.2 Combined Quantitative and Qualitative Approach......... 23 3.3 Ethnographic Field Study Approach................. 27 3.3.1 Field Study Design....................... 28 3.3.2 Observation and Interviewing................ 33 3.3.3 Interview Analysis....................... 37 3.4 Network Analysis Approach..................... 40 3.4.1 Data and Field Delineation.................. 41 3.4.2 Clustering............................ 51 3.4.3 Node Role Classification.................... 57 3.4.4 Collaboration Network and Subcommunity Structure... 58 3.4.5 On the Correspondence Between Co-Author Links and Collaboration.......................... 62 3.4.6 Author Name Disambiguation................ 68 4 Empirical Results - Ethnographies 76 4.1 Local Environment........................... 77 4.1.1 Group Structure and Definition of Research Tasks..... 81 4.1.2 Research Culture........................ 98 4.1.3 Group as Collective Actor................... 118 4.1.4 Collaborations......................... 143 4.2 Coordination with Common Knowledge Base........... 157 4.2.1 Information Needs and Information Use.......... 159 4.2.2 Offering Contributions to Common Knowledge Base (Publishing)........................... 173 4.2.3 Openness and Competition.................. 191 4.3 Collective Production.......................... 227 4.3.1 Ordering Power of Knowledge Base............. 228 vii 4.3.2 Community Ties........................ 234 5 Empirical Results - Network Analysis 246 5.1 Mesoscopic Network Structure.................... 247 5.1.1 Node Roles........................... 248 5.1.2 Co-Author Clusters....................... 249 5.2 Collaboration Network and Subcommunity Structure....... 258 5.2.1 Collaboration Networks.................... 258 5.2.2 Subcommunity Structure................... 259 6 Explaining Field Differences in Scientific Communication 267 6.1 Analytic Framework to Study Openness and Sharing....... 267 6.2 Combining Publication Network Analysis with Ethnographic Field Studies............................... 274 6.3 Scaling Up Ethnographies....................... 276 7 Conclusions 278 A Index of Field Interviews 285 viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This dissertation is about differences in communication practices across scientific fields, and how to study those differences. It explores how differences in the communicative behavior of scientists can be traced back to differences in the kind of research they are doing. The focus is on one aspect of scientific communication in particular: how openly do research teams within a research specialty share scientific knowledge?

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