Program update #dhiha6: The collective dynamics of science – publish or perish; is it all that counts?

Unfortunately, Julianne Nyhan will not be able to attend the conference “Digital Humanities Experiments” and give her keynote speach. David Chavalarias (ISC-PIF, Paris) will take her place and present his paper: “The collective dynamics of science – publish or perish; is it all that counts?”.

Thursday, June 11th 2015: 6 p.m. David Chavalarias (ISC-PIF, Paris): The collective dynamics of science – publish or perish; is it all that counts?

There is an increasing pressure on scholars to publish to further or sustain a career in academia. The Governments and funding agencies are greedy of indicators based on the scientic production to measure science performance. But what do we know exactly about science dynamics and the relations between publication levels and the advances in science ? How the social dynamics and social norms interfer with the quality of scientific production ? Are there different regimes of collective dynamics of science?

We will start with an insight on new approach which aims at reconstructing the collective dynamics of science, displaying a large diversity of evolutionary patterns in science. Then, we will propose a formalization of the process of collective scientific discovery in the framework of evolutionary game theory, which puts forward the social game of science. We will sketch the impact of the social pressure to publish on science dynamics and quality of published works.

David Chavalarias is a CNRS permanent researcher, at Centre d’Analyses de Mathématiques Sociales (CAMS), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and Director of the Complex Systems Institute of Paris Ile-de-France. David Chavalarias’ research interests are Web mining and Quali-quantitative Epistemology, Cognitive economics and modelling of cultural dynamics as well as Collective discovery and scientific discovery.