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Библиометрические признаки как символические маркеры дисциплинарных границ: социологическая перспектива
Symbolic markers (as those used in “we-they” attributions) help delineate whether a scientist (among other things) finds themselves at the intersection, within, or outside the confines of a given disciplinary boundary, thereby facilitating the swift navigation across an ever-growing corpus of scientific literature. Frequently, these boundaries are revealed through bibliometric analysis, which makes it possible to observe some quantifiable characteristics of the features of the proposed boundaries. Nevertheless, this method falls short of providing a sociologically meaningful interpretation, particularly regarding the historical dynamics and the demarcation of scientific disciplinary communities, unless the subjective salience of these observable features is meticulously considered.
To measure the salience of bibliometric features: 1) we selected “façade” features (such as the length of titles counted in words, length of reference lists, and number of co-authors) and analyzed them using metadata from Russian sociological and psychological journals; 2) using an experimental methodology in a separate study, we addressed two disciplinary groups of scientists tasked to guess the distribution parameters of these features in two types of articles affiliated with corresponding disciplines — this procedure assessed the accuracy of intuitive everyday predictions, indicating the effect of implicit background knowledge about the features that could be used as heuristics for disciplinary attribution.
Comparing the predictions with bibliometric data, we found that the reference list length was the most salient perceptual feature, especially in the case of psychological articles. Title length was salient to sociologists at the intragroup level, helping them differentiate between disciplines.
The article discusses the comparative significance and prospects for further use of objectively observed bibliometric differences to formulate and test hypotheses about the internal principles of demarcation and the processes of mutual influence of scientific disciplines. The methodology tested in this study has the potential to obtain additional knowledge regarding the results of previously conducted and planned scientometric studies.