ArticleAmerican sociological review2010
The Temporal Structure of Scientific Consensus Formation.
Article in American sociological review, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 327 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Quantifying the rise and fall of scientific fields.PloS one · 2022Article
- Article
- The nature and origins of political polarization over science.Public understanding of science (Bristol, England) · 2021Article
- Computational Social Science and Sociology.Annual review of sociology · 2020Article
- Structure in personal networks: Constructing and comparing typologies.Network science (Cambridge University Press) · 2020Article
- Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?The American economic review · 2019Article
- Measuring discursive influence across scholarship.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Science of science.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2018Review
- Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2018Article
- Disparate foundations of scientists' policy positions on contentious biomedical research.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Exit, cohesion, and consensus: social psychological moderators of consensus among adolescent peer groups.Social currents · 2017Article
- Choosing experiments to accelerate collective discovery.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
- On disciplinary fragmentation and scientific progress.PloS one · 2015Article
- Mapping interdisciplinary fields: efficiencies, gaps and redundancies in HIV/AIDS research.PloS one · 2014Article
- MOMENTS OF UNCERTAINTY: ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND EMERGING CONTAMINANTS.Sociological forum (Randolph, N.J.) · 2013Article
- Bibliometric Evidence for a Hierarchy of the Sciences.PloS one · 2013Article
- Cultural Anchors and the Organization of Differences: A Multi-method Analysis of LGBT Marches on Washington.American sociological review · 2011Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
This article engages with problems that are usually opaque: What trajectories do scientific debates assume, when does a scientific community consider a proposition to be a fact, and how can we know that? We develop a strategy for evaluating the state of scientific contestation on issues. The analysis builds from Latour's black box imagery, which we observe in scientific citation networks. We show that as consensus forms, the importance of internal divisions to the overall network structure declines. We consider substantive cases that are now considered facts, such as the carcinogenicity of smoking and the non-carcinogenicity of coffee. We then employ the same analysis to currently contested cases: the suspected carcinogenicity of cellular phones, and the relationship between 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 scientific propositions may experience en route to consensus.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.