The project develops a new strategy to explain and measure scientific consensus formation. It develops a quantitative measure of scientific consensus, based on an analysis of the structure of scientific citation networks. The measure is validated by exploiting changing consensus levels across time regarding several scientific propositions, such as "smoking causes cancer", "Human activity causes a climate change", etc. The analysis reveals a surprising dynamic of consensus formation in one case - the carcinogenicity of smoking - during the 1970s (before scientific consensus on the issue was consider a fact). The work is validated by qualitative, in depth interviews with the scientists who produced these high contestation levels through their work on developing a safer cigarette.
Intellectual Merit: The project advances the literature in three ways. First, the research develops a model for the process of consensus formation in science. Second, the project develops a new metric that measures consensus/contestation degree in scientific literatures. Finally, the research develops a new approach to account for temporality in scientific debates.
This project contributes to the history of science by explaining why claims such as "Coffee (does not) cause cancer" are accepted with no contestation, while the climate change claim met social contestation coupled with minor scientific contestation, and the carcinogenicity of smoking met social contestation coupled with surprising scientific contestation.
Broader impact: This project offers a new property for comparative research into science policy, supplying a measure of scientific consensus levels that may be utilized over multiple dimensions, including time, space and social organization. The project offers a way of informing the public and policy makers on important scientific issues; currently, scientific claims are often discarded as "premature" or "inconclusive", while the experts promoting them may be considered to be promoting a political agenda. The proposed approach overrides such claims by evaluating consensus without expert interpretation, relying solely on the structure of scientific literature.
This project engaged with problems that are usually opaque: When does a scientific community consider a proposition as a fact, and how can we know that? Old and new traditions in Science Studies leave this question to experts, whether these are practitioners, ethnographers, or Science Technology and Society (STS) scholars serving as intermediaries between practitioners and publics. This project built on different insights from the sociology of science (broadly defined) and developed a strategy for evaluating the state of scientific contestation on issues. We identify a "better" strategy regardless of epistemology: for realists it is unbiased, while for those eschewing objectivity it is democratic, allowing many publics to estimate science independently. The analysis rests on Latour’s black box imagery, here observed in scientific citation networks. We show that as consensus forms, the importance of internal divisions to the overall network structure declines. We considered six substantive cases that are now considered facts, such as the carcinogenicity of smoking and the non-carcinogenicity of coffee. We then employed the same analysis to currently contested cases: the suspected carcinogenicity of cellular phones, and the relationship between MMR vaccines and autism.. Extracting meaning from the internal structure of scientific knowledge carves a niche for renewed sociological commentary on science, revealing a typology of trajectories that propositions may experience en route to falsification or "truth". The project resulted in the completion Of Shwed's dissertation and has spawned a number of collaborations that are currently in progress.
