The Role of the Priority Rule in Science

Strevens, Michael

doi:10.5840/jphil2003100224

Cited by 222 publications

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“…Michael Strevens argues that the priority rule plays an important part in science as an incentive for individual scientists to work toward potentially valuable discoveries; they desire the prestige that making a discovery will grant them, and so through the work of individual, ambitious scientists, science benefits overall from their discoveries (Strevens 2003). Despite the role of competition between scientists and groups, however, both Strevens and Remco Heesen provide arguments for why it nevertheless benefits individual scientists to subscribe to a communist approach to science, or "total sharing" of information.…”

Section: Implications For the Norms And Practice Of Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

On serendipity in science: discovery at the intersection of chance and wisdom

Copeland

2017

Synthese

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Section: Implications For the Norms And Practice Of Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

On serendipity in science: discovery at the intersection of chance and wisdom

Copeland

2017

Synthese

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“…Publication delay, the central chronological period in the process, is generally perceived as a negative factor in information dissemination because its influence on the priority reward (Strevens, 2003) associated with publication of original or novel scientific ideas.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Editorial and publication delay of papers submitted to 14 selected Food Research journals. Influence of online posting

Amat

2007

Scientometrics

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Introduction: Publication delay, chronological distance between completion of a scientific work and distribution of its achievements as a peer reviewed paper, is a negative phenomenon in scientific information dissemination. It can be further subdivided in successive stages corresponding to the peer review process and the technical preparation of accepted manuscripts. Formal online posting in electronic versions of journals has been considered as a shortening of the process.Objectives: To determine publication delay in a group of leading Food Research journals, as well as factors affecting this lag and also to compute the effect of formal online posting on the distribution of papers in electronic form. Secondary objective is also to study the possible effect of informal posting of papers through some repositories on the publication delay in the field.Methods: 14 Food Research journals were selected and 4836 papers published in 2004 were examined. Dates of first submission, submission of revised manuscripts, acceptation, online posting and final publication were recorded for each paper.Analysis: Data collected were analyzed using SPSS and SigmaPlot. Parametric correlation between some variables was determined and ANOVA was performed with BMDP package for significance analysis of differences among journals.Results: average publication delay of papers submitted to the set of selected journals is 348 ± 104 days, with European Food Research and Technology and Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry showing the shortest delays. Total delay strongly depends on the peer review process. On average, 85.75 % of manuscripts are corrected prior to their acceptance by journals. Online posting of papers prior to their print publication reduces total delay in about 29 %. On average, a paper is posted online 260 days after its submission to the set of journals.Conclusions: Publication delay of papers is strongly dependent on the peer review process, which affects most of the manuscripts in the Food Research field. Advanced online publication through formal posting at the editor's sites only slightly reduces the time between reception and final publication of papers.

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“…In order to do so, they calculate their marginal contribution to the epistemic success of this project and also their potential reward, based on the reward scheme in place. The most well-known of these models, those proposed by Philip Kitcher (1990Kitcher ( , 1993 and Michael Strevens (2003), show that optimal distributions of cognitive labor can be achieved even if all scientists acted in self-interested ways, at least under a certain set of assumptions.…”

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Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor

Weisberg¹,

Muldoon

2009

Philosophy of Science

225

194

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Because contemporary scientific research is conducted by groups of scientists, understanding scientific progress requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. We present a novel agent-based model of scientific research in which scientists divide their labor to explore an unknown epistemic landscape. Scientists aim to find the most epistemically significant research approaches. We consider three different search strategies that scientists can adopt for exploring the landscape. In the first, scientists work alone and do not let the discoveries of the community influence their actions. This is compared with two social research strategies: Followers are biased toward what others have already discovered, and we find that pure populations of these scientists do less well than scientists acting independently. However, pure populations of mavericks, who try to avoid research approaches that have already been taken, vastly outperform the other strategies. Finally, we show that, in mixed populations, mavericks stimulate followers to greater levels of epistemic production, making polymorphic populations of mavericks and followers ideal in many research domains. Disciplines PhilosophyThis journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/philosophy_papers/7 Because contemporary scientific research is conducted by groups of scientists, understanding scientific progress requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. We present a novel agent-based model of scientific research in which scientists divide their labor to explore an unknown epistemic landscape. Scientists aim to find the most epistemically significant research approaches. We consider three different search strategies that scientists can adopt for exploring the landscape. In the first, scientists work alone and do not let the discoveries of the community influence their actions. This is compared with two social research strategies: Followers are biased toward what others have already discovered, and we find that pure populations of these scientists do less well than scientists acting independently. However, pure populations of mavericks, who try to avoid research approaches that have already been taken, vastly outperform the other strategies. Finally, we show that, in mixed populations, mavericks stimulate followers to greater levels of epistemic production, making polymorphic populations of mavericks and followers ideal in many research domains.

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The Role of the Priority Rule in Science

Cited by 222 publications

References 0 publications

On serendipity in science: discovery at the intersection of chance and wisdom

On serendipity in science: discovery at the intersection of chance and wisdom

Editorial and publication delay of papers submitted to 14 selected Food Research journals. Influence of online posting

Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor

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