The intensification of science as a social institution—known as scientization—is a hallmark of post-industrial society, characterized by deepening research within primary fields and expanding into new ones. While computational analyses of large bibliometric datasets reveal historical trends in the growth of science, their scale misses underlying dynamics. Conversely, qualitative accounts of specific discoveries provide context but fail to capture broader processes driving scientization. This paper introduces a middle-range approach to studying the expansion of science, focusing on scientific responses to significant scientific events (“S-events”) within specific fields over fixed periods. By combining bibliometric data with natural language processing analyses of semantic networks and expert assessments, this approach sheds light on the development of epistemic communities and their role in deepening, broadening, and interacting to foster scientific progress. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) event generated discovery by facilitating a fluid epistemic community of interconnected scientific papers, journals, and scientists. The accumulation of PISA papers appeared not only in directly relevant journals, but also in those at cognitive distance from educational learning science. A dynamic of new ideas broadened the main conceptual core network, while other ideas formed short-lived distal conceptual cores. This case study highlights the strengths and limitations of this middle-range approach for investigating scientization processes.
Baker et al. (Mon,) studied this question.