Metascience (research)

Metascience refers to the systematic investigation of the scientific enterprise, in other words, the use of scientific methodology to study science itself.

History

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, metascience consists of "inquiry into the methodology and philosophical implications of scientific investigation," and was first introduced by C.W. Morris in 1938. They write:

— We may introduce the term ‘metascience’ as a synonym for ‘the science of science.’

Other sources suggest that the term may have been in use as far back as the late 19th century.[1] In recent years, use of the term has gained momentum in the context of the "reproducibility crisis." Specifically, researchers have used "metascience" as a broad term to describe efforts to both characterize the validity of a given body of research (say, for example, the reliability of published drug targets[2]) as well as efforts to reform journalistic practices, incentive structures, and statistical methods. [3][4]

The journal Metascience is published by the Springer-Nature Group, and serves the metascientific research community. The journal published reviews of books in the history of science, philosophy of science, sociology of science, and science studies. The journal originated in Australia, and over the years has had a variety of editors, including Steven French, Stathis Psillos, and Theodore Arabatzis. It is now edited by K. Brad Wray and Luciano Boschiero.[Note: see link to webpage: https://link.springer.com/journal/11016]

Scientific Data Science

Metascience encompasses both qualitative and quantitative methods. A sub-discipline of metascience that is unique to the modern era is scientific data science, or the use of data science to analyse research papers themselves. Research in scientific data science ranges from fraud detection, [5] to citation network analysis, [6] to developing novel metrics for assessing research impact. [7]

The website FiveThirtyEight uses the tag "meta-science"[8] for many of its posts covering controversies and developments in contemporary science.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Google Books: Metascience". books.google.com. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
  2. ↑ "Believe it or not: how much can we rely on published data on potential drug targets?". nature.com. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
  3. ↑ "The Infancy of Metascience". edge.org. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
  4. ↑ "A manifesto for reproducible science". nature.com. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
  5. ↑ Markowitz, David M.; Hancock, Jeffrey T. (2016). "Linguistic obfuscation in fraudulent science". Journal of Language and Social Psychology. 35 (4): 435–445. doi:10.1177/0261927X15614605. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
  6. ↑ Ding, Y. (2010). "Applying weighted PageRank to author citation networks". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 62 (2): 236–245. arXiv:1102.1760. doi:10.1002/asi.21452. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
  7. ↑ Zhu, X.; Turney, P.; Lemire, D.; Vellino, A. (2015). "Measuring academic influence: Not all citations are equal". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 66 (2): 408–427. arXiv:1501.06587. doi:10.1002/asi.23179. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
  8. ↑ Meta-Science - FiveThirtyEight

Journals

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