What are the classics of the "Science of Science" or "Meta …

Here's a (very disorganized and incomplete) handful of suggestions, which I may add to. Suggestions welcome, especially if you've dug into relevant literatures.

1. The already classic "Estimating the reproducibility of
psychological science" from the Open Science Collaboration of @BrianNosek et al. https://t.co/yjGczLZ6Je

(Look at that abstract, wow!)

Many people had pointed out problems with standard statistical methods, going back decades (what are the best refs?). But this paper was a sledgehammer, making it impossible to ignore the question: what, if anything, were we actually learning from all those statistical studies?

2. Dean Keith Simonton's book "Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist". If an essentially scientometric book could be described as a fun romp through science & creativity, this would be it https://t.co/RQ935H1fKs

3. From the philosophy of science literature, I especially like Lakatos's "Proofs and Refutations", Feyerabend's "Against Method", and Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". I should probably dig deeper into other schools (recs?) (Yes, I've read Popper's main works.)

4. Speaking of Feyerabend, Steve Weinberg had some surprisingly sympathetic & characteristically insightful comments on Feyerabend, which I expect would bear re-reading. I've lost the reference.

5. Switching genre, there's the work of @pierre_azoulay and collaborators, studying the HHMI versus NIH approaches to discovery in the life sciences: https://t.co/9eta708dVf

6. From 2018, a nice review paper on "The Science of Science", coming from a network science / scientometrics point of view. There are tonnes of interesting observations in the paper, many of which I bundled up in this thread: https://t.co/potbylhgxt

https://t.co/xduj2A8c8q

A few observations from "The Science of Science", a useful review article appearing in this week's Science: https://t.co/D6DENKF4rS
— Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) March 9, 2018

7. One of our best long-term observers of science and science policy was Daniel Greenberg (who passed away last year). Many possibilities to choose from, but here's one I got a lot out of: "Science, Money, and Politics": https://t.co/8QANkuL6ZA

8. Harry Collins has done some wonderful work on the central role of tacit knowledge in science. Here's one of his classics, on the role of tacit knowledge in figuring out how good sapphire is as a lasing material: https://t.co/Oaz2VWySmM

That sounds very specialized. It's not. It goes to questions at the very heart of science, both institutionally and methodologically. Rather, Collins' paper is a beautiful detailed study of tacit knowledge.

(Tangentially: one way my thinking has changed is in gradually understand how tied together our institutions and our methodologies are. There's a kind of Conway's Law in action: our institutions tend to mirror our methodology, and vice versa.)

9. The institutions around us are, of course, all made up, out of ideas - things like universities, PhDs, journals, etc, even the notion of "Science", are first and foremost conceptual innovations. I'd love to understand the history of those ideas better.

One striking text in this vein is Francis Bacon's 1627 "The New Atlantis", which introduces "Salamon's House", which strongly influenced the design of the Royal Society (1660), and modern universities. https://t.co/bznUG1eTH5

10. Another good one in this vein is Vannevar Bush's "Science: the Endless Frontier", which helped establish the concepts underpinning the modern basic research ecosystem https://t.co/bpc1nPg8A7

11. Indeed, I've heard it argued that Bush is the person most responsible for developing the concept of "basic research", and this was done in part as a way of winning a political fight to motivate funding for pure research. The argument is made here: https://t.co/QPMCAEYSLE

12. David Lang suggests Paula Stephan's book here: https://t.co/zQiuTlWOdR

The book has been in my queue for some time, and is almost certainly a good overview of a huge chunk of economic thinking about science.

Great thread. I\u2019d add Paula Stephan\u2019s book: https://t.co/QdIPBchdym
— David Lang (@davidtlang) January 14, 2021

Interlude: thanks for the many wonderful replies!!

Twitter threading makes it a little hard to skim the thread. Expandable tree version here, thanks to @paulgb's great treeverse Chrome extension: https://t.co/vF4JF0Gf4J

I'll indulge myself a bit, and ask @dabacon, @AndrewDohertyQu, @quantum_aram, @uncatherio, @albrgr, @DGoroff, @BrianNosek, @juliagalef, @juanbenet, @AdamMarblestone, @patrickc, @pierre_azoulay if you have any particular favorite additions for the list?

What are the classics of the "Science of Science" or "Meta Science"? If you were teaching a class on the subject, what would go in the syllabus?

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