Scholarly communication and epistemic cultures

The ways in which scientists communicate have long attracted scholars ’ attention (e.g., Meadows, 1998). Structural-functionalist accounts of how science works as a social system (Merton, 1976) coexist (and sometimes compete) with thickly descriptive laboratory accounts of science-in-action (e.g., Latour & Woolgar, 1979), discipline-specific mappings of communicative processes (e.g., Garvey & Griffith, 1971) and painstaking socio-historical accounts of scientific practice (e.g., Shapin, 1994). Science, sometimes seen as “the premier knowledge institution throughout the world ” (Knorr Cetina, 1999, p. 1), has been studied intensively, and scientists themselves are a much-observed species, both from afar and also up close in their natural habitats. Knowing how scientists work, how they interact with their peers and publics, is not just intrinsically interesting to ethnographers, sociologists of science, and sundry others, but has a bearing on the development of effective academic information resources and information support systems. Why that is the case will shortly become clear. A great deal of scientific communication, indeed, scholarly communication in general, is informal in nature. Information diffusion depends on the conductivity of socio-cognitive networks, sometimes referred to as “invisible colleges ” (Crane, 1972). Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of science, to appropriate the language of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979), is to produce inscriptions—to publish. Scientists,