The Hand of Science: Academic Writing and Its Rewards

215 Pages·2005·7.296 MB·English

by  Blaise Cronin

The Hand of Science
Academic Writing and
Its Rewards
Blaise Cronin
THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Lanham, Maryland • Toronto • Oxford
2005
11111>11,lll'd 111 Iii<' l l11ill·d Slall'S or America
hy Srn11·now l'rl'ss. l11c.
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Copyright© 2005 by Blaise Cronin
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cronin, Blaise.
The hand of science : academic writing and its rewards/ Blaise Cronin.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8108-5282-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
I. Communication in science. 2. Learning and scholarship. I. Title.
Q223.C76 2005
808' .0665-dc22
2004024303
QTM
'Cl The paper used in this publicat;ion meets the minimum requirements or
American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence or Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NIS O Z39 .48-1992
For Carmen and Rafael
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the at
tention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a
poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently
among the overabundance of information sources that might con
sume it.
- Herbert Simon (1971)
Attention is a mode of payment, as well as the main input to scien
tific production .... Reputation is the asset into which the attention
received from colleagues crystallizes.
-Georg Franck (I 999)
Too often, the layman envisages scientific research as a locus of
Olympian accord, an Arcadia of fairness. Teamwork in the sciences,
in a patron's laboratory, can be fraught with jealousies, with fiercely
competing egoism. Whose name will figure when the results are
published? This invidia has become more acute as the economics of
success become greater and the funding more precarious.
-George Steiner (2003)
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Scholars and Scripts
2 Epistemic Cultures 11
3 Hyperauthorship 41
4 Information Space 71
5 Intellectual Collaboration 95
6 The Reward System 117
7 Symbolic Capitalism 139
8 The Attention Economy 167
9 Scientometric Spectroscopy 193
Index 199
About the Author 213
V
Acknowledgments
Much, though by no means all, of the raw material for The Hand of Sci
ence derives from papers I have published or presentations I have given
on scholarly communication and related topics in recent years. In some
cases, the textual correspondence between the original and present ver
sions is fairly easy to detect; in others, as a result of kneading, blending,
and refreshing, the inheritance is no longer immediately obvious. For
the record, I have listed the primary published sources below. A leitmo
tif of this book is the collaborative character of science and scholarship,
whether the collaboration is formal or informal in nature. Truth be told,
we rarely work as isolates; rather, we are embedded in a variety of so
cial networks-invisible colleges, to use the time-honored term-and it
is these webs of peer-to-peer connections that provide us with much of
the stimulation and support essential for the development of our ideas
and, ultimately, for the furtherance of our academic careers.
This is a periphrastic way of saying that there is a platoon of coau
thors, trusted assessors, and backgrounded others, whose "beneficial
collegiality," to use Laband and Tollison's (2000, 633) felicitous phrase,
warrants acknowledgment. These good souls-pace Graham Harman
(2002, vii) who feels that a long list of names at the front of a book is
"like some Praetorian guard [that] often serves to intimidate readers, to
make them feel outclassed by a competent network of college profes
sors, research institutions, and fellowship foundations" -are, in alpha
betical order, Helen Atkins, Katy Bomer, Holly Crawford, Ron Day,
Elisabeth Davenport, Martin Dillon, Rob Kling, Elin Jacob, Kathryn La
vii
1111 :\, A11,111'1,·dg1111·111.1·
1111111·. I h•1ill11'Y Md,1111, Stacy Nienhouse, Alice Robbin, Yvonne
U11v1·1~. I l11w111d l<11,l'11h:111111. Debora Shaw, Lisa Spector, and Reyes
\'1111 lii-ld11 Mv 1•.1:ilil11tk lo !hem all, in appropriate measure. In addi-
111111. I ,h111ild l1kL· lo acknowledge the feedback I received from name
"'"' rnllL·:i!,'.lll's following conference and seminar presentations at the
Al<L (t\ssocialion of Research Libraries) in Washington, D.C.; Duke
l l11ivcrsi1y; Indiana University, Bloomington; Manchester Metropolitan
llnivcrsity; Napier University, Edinburgh; the University of New South
Wales; OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), Columbus, Ohio; and
the University of Toronto. Nothing ex nihilo.
REFERENCES
Harman, G. (2001). Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects.
Chicago: Open Court.
Laband, D. N. and Tollison, R. D. (2000). Intellectual collaboration. Journal of
Political Economy, 108(3), 632-662.
ORIGINAL SOURCES
Cronin, B. (1992). Acknowledged but ignored: Credit where credit's due. Bul
letin of the American Society for Information Science, 18(3), 25.
Cronin, B. (1996). Rates of return to citation. Journal of Documentation, 52(2),
188-197.
Cronin, B. (1998). Metatheorizing citation. Scientometrics, 43(1 ), 45-55.
Cronin, B. (1999). The Warholian moment and other proto-indicators of schol
arly salience. Journal of the American Society for Information Science,
50(10), 953-955.
Cronin, B. (2000). Semiotics and evaluative bibliometrics. Journal of Docu
mentation, 56(3), 440-453.
Cronin, B. (2001). Bibliometrics and beyond: some thoughts on web-based ci
tation analysis. Journal of Information Science, 27(1 ), 1-7.
Cronin, B. (2002). Hyperauthorship: a postmodern perversion or evidence of a
structural shift in scholarly communication practices? Journal of the Ameri
can Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(7), 558-569.
Cronin, B. (2003). Scholarly communication and epistemic cultures. New Re
view ofA cademic Librarianship, 9, 1-24.
Acknowledgments ix
Cronin, B. (2004). Bowling alone together: Academic writing as distributed
cognition. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology, 55(6), 557-560.
Cronin, B. (2004). Normative shaping of scientific practice: The magic of Mer
ton. Scientometrics, 60(1), 41-46.
Cronin, B. and La Barre, K. (2004). Mickey Mouse and Milton: Book publish
ing in the humanities. Learned Publishing, 17(2), 85-98.
Cronin, B. and Shaw, D. (2002). Banking (on) different forms of symbolic cap
ital. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technol
ogy, 53(13), 1267-1270.
Cronin, B. Shaw, D., and La Barre, K. (2003). A cast of thousands. Co-authorship
and sub-authorship collaboration in the twentieth century as manifested in the
scholarly literature of psychology and philosophy. Journal oft he American So
ciety for Information Science and Technology, 54(9), 855-871.
Cronin, B., Shaw, D., and La Barre, K. (2004). Visible, less visible, and invis
ible work: Patterns of collaboration in twentieth century chemistry. Journal
of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(2),
160-168.
Chapter One
Scholars and Seri pts
If I may paraphrase Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gen
tilhomme, for almost twenty-five years I have been engaged in a process
of situated rhetorical action without really knowing it. This is what we
do when we write, according to C. N. Candlin, general series editor of
Applied Linguistics and Language Study, in his introduction to Ken Hy
land's analysis of academic writing as "collective social practices" (Hy
land 2000, 1). Just as in conversation, so it is with academic writing.
Writing is a form of social interaction with our peers, and literary gen
res give shape and structure to those negotiated interactions. We don't
usually insult colleagues to their face; nor do we usually seek to alien
ate them in our professional writings. Genre conventions, which are not
immutable and can be subtly manipulated, are the disciplinarily sanc
tioned means whereby authors endeavor to convey their messages to
readers. Academic writing is replete with genres and rhetorical tropes:
this is a scholarly monograph (not easily confused with an abstract or a
research article) and, as such, it should (and probably will) conform to
the dominant structural, syntactic, and stylistic features of that genre, or
at least one of its identifiable subgenres.
Hyland's corpus-based analysis of the various communicative cate
gories, or moves, associated with different literary genres is instructive.
Take the case of abstracts, where authors walk a fine line between pro
viding the reader with an accurate representation of the larger text (of
ten impersonal and seemingly agentless) and hooking the reader's
interest using a certain degree of promotional legerdemain. In an
( 'l,11,,,,.,. ( )11,·
,·,,111,1111v 111 11111'11111111. 11111st· Si111011'.s (1971) now very fashionable
pl 1111',1·, t Ill' 11h~11 :11'1 has lwl'rnllt' an l'Ven more important instrument for
•,,·1111111 11111",1'11 :1p1111 I 111111 thl' 111ass or published work competing for the
11·,1d,·1 ·,, 11ttl'llt11111 h111ally interesting is Hyland's analysis of a relative
111·w, 111111·1 111 till· .slahk or academic writing genres, the scientific letter
t,· v . /'hl'.11, ., l.1•tt1•r.1· II). Unlike the traditional, peer-reviewed article,
whll'h t'Vl'11l11ally appears in the discipline's journal of record, the sci-
1·111 II II' lcttn ( a rl'lurn to the Ur-form of communication, as we shall see
111 d1apll'r .l) is a fast track for channeling breaking news to the scien
tilil' t·o11111111nity. Here, boldness and tentativeness coexist. The author's
dai111s 111ust be sufficiently compelling to hold the reader's attention,
yet not so brash as to constitute a breach of scientific reporting conven
t ions. Hyland's (2000, 87) microlevel lexical analysis of this genre il
lustrates the role played by hedges and boosters ("communicative
strategies for increasing or reducing the force of statements") in main
taining stability between these at times conflicting objectives. For ex
ample, scientific letters make much greater use of boosters (e.g., evi
dently, clearly, obviously) than do conventional research articles, but
hedges (e.g., may, seem, possibly) are used more frequently in letters
than boosters.
Citation analysis, especially evaluative bibliometrics, is one of the
staples of information science research. Linguists, however, are typi
cally more interested in the language forms associated with citations
than with their potential as tokens for use in research evaluation or sci
ence mapping exercises. Hyland provides a cross-disciplinary analysis
of the reporting verbs associated with integral and nonintegral citations.
He systematically analyzes how authors embed their arguments in net
works of references (as I shall sedulously demonstrate in the pages that
follow) and how those referencing acts are linguistically framed in the
text. One is struck, however, by the differences between Hyland's ap
proach and the approaches traditionally favored by information scien
tists. It is as if the two research communities are at times unaware of
each other's existence, an observation made originally by Swales
(1986). For example, and without any implied criticism, Hyland doesn't
mention Small's (1978) work on citations as concept markers/symbols
or White's (e.g., 2001) studies of citation image and identity (antici
pated, as it happens, in Hyland's [2000, 37] notion of a "professional
persona"). Such omissions merely serve to underscore the desirability