Paper on scientometrics

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Fil, 

 

It seems to me that in your paper scientific developments are exogenous:
"and exogenous events, such as scientific discoveries." You assume that
collaborations in social networks (e.g., coauthorships) are the drivers of
new developments. One could argue that this is the case in normal science
more than in periods of radical change. 

 

I would prefer to consider communications and their codification as the
drivers of change. Kuhn (1972, at p. 151) refers to Max Planck's
autobiography, where he states that the agents can be expected to be
conservative. From this perspective, the social network could be considered
as the retention mechanism of the nonlinear dynamics of communications and
codes. 

 

Best,

Loet

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.asis.org/pipermail/sigmetrics/attachments/20130728/0777e8b8/attachment.html>