An empirical investigation of the Tribes and their Territories: are research specialisms rural and urban?

Abstract

A long tradition of sociological research aims to understand the differences in the organizational and cognitive structure of scientific fields. This sociological tradition was in its earlier years intimately connected with the emerging field of bibliometric methods and applications, originated in the 1960s with the work of Storer and Price. However, the sociology of science and scientometrics have since the early 1980s drifted apart and attempts to reconcile them, or to reconcile the more theoretically inclined field of science and technology studies with scientometrics, have not had the desired effect. Recently, scholars have again argued for the need for interdisciplinary work bridging the sociology of science or science and technology studies with scientometrics. We take up these calls and explore ways to bridge the sociology of science with scientometrics by offering an operationalisation and empirical assessment of the rural and urban sociological framework by Becker and Trowler (2001). We compare ten specialisms from five disciplines: history, computer science, astrophysics, literature and biology, and study the connectivity properties of the bibliographic coupling networks of each. Our results show that the specialisms in the humanities possess a much lower connectivity, organising in many, smaller topics of research. They also show a lower reliance on shared core sources, contrary to the framework's predictions, suggesting that more theoretical and empirical work is required in order to fully characterise different specialisms of research.