Exploring the Constellation of Communities Shaping Science Reform and its Future Progress

When, in 2011, concerns grew over the state of science, a community of individuals quickly organized with the goal of reforming science through improving its practices and its culture. While the reform community is often referred to as a single community in literature and informal discourse, previous qualitative research gives rise to the question of whether we should consider that the reform community is, in fact, a collection of communities who each approach the goal of improving science in their own overlapping, yet distinct ways – with their own methods, philosophies, and priorities. This study takes a social network analysis approach to this question, using a partitioning algorithm to explore the sub-community structure of a larger, single network. I find evidence of a possible sub-community structure in the reform community and conclude with implications of this finding for the future progress of the science reform movement.