Yves Gingras’s research while affiliated with Université de Montréal and other places

In this article, we analyze the relative (in)visibility of authors in four countries that are central to the global production of sociology: France, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. A cross-comparison of these national fields shows that, although citation distributions consistently follow a power law, authors who are the most frequently cited in their national field are not necessarily those who are the most frequently cited abroad. Mapping the space of national and international visibility of authors in each analyzed country shows an invariant structure: a majority of authors are only visible nationally, fewer authors reach a large national visibility and relative international visibility, and even fewer authors reach a large national and international visibility. Thus, only a very few authors of the four countries achieve what we can call a ‘global’ visibility, which is associated with the production and circulation, through translations, of works of theoretical nature. Our findings generalize Etienne Ollion and Andrew Abbott’s analysis of the reception of French sociologists in the field of American sociology, by showing that their results have nothing specific to the French case and rather constitute a very general result that applies to the distribution of citations within any national field.

Scholarly journals have been de-nationalizing and anglicizing their names for the past six decades in order to gain international visibility and facilitate their indexation in major international databases. Using the Web of Science, we analyzed the historical evolution of this trend and its geography, showing that it has been particularly concentrated in a few countries at different periods of time. Then, we evaluated how title changes have affected the evolution of the journals’ language of publication, authorship, readership and impact. The acceleration of the trend towards the de-nationalization and anglicization of journal titles coincided with the rise of discourses on internationalization in the 1980s and the growing use, a decade later, of quantitative indicators in research evaluation, above all the Impact Factor. In general, this rebranding strategy of scholarly journals resulted in a higher visibility on the global market of scientific publications, leading to a more internationalized authorship and readership, but to the detriment of the use of national languages.

Cet article analyse les embauches des professeurs d’université dans le champ des sciences sociales au Québec (principalement en sociologie, science politique, économie, géographie, anthropologie, communication, psychologie/psychoéducation et travail social) entre 1900 et 2020. Nous montrons que la langue d’enseignement (français ou anglais), la position géographique (métropoles ou régions) de l’université d’embauche et le prestige perçu des universités d’obtention du doctorat et d’embauche constituent autant de facteurs contribuant à la structuration du marché de l’emploi universitaire québécois en sciences sociales. Nous mettons au jour un mouvement historique de « québécisation » des embauches, analogue au mouvement de « canadianisation » observé dans le reste du Canada, qui a débuté à la fin des années 1960, atteint son apogée à la fin des années 1990, et connu ensuite un recul au tournant du 21 e siècle dans le contexte des discours sur l’internationalisation des universités. Nous montrons finalement l’existence d’une féminisation des corps professoraux qui, pour être différenciée selon les disciplines, est continuelle depuis la fin des années 1960.

Economics has the reputation to be an insular discipline with little consideration for other social sciences and humanities (SSH). Recent research (Angrist et al., 2020) challenges this perception of economics: the perception would be historically inaccurate and especially at odds with the recent interdisciplinarity of economics. By systematically studying citation patterns since the 1950s in thousands of journals, we offer the best established conclusions to date on this issue. Our results do show that the discipline is uniquely insular from a historical point of view. But we also document an important turn after the 1990s that drastically transformed the discipline as it became more open, very quickly, to the influence of management, environmental sciences and to a lesser degree, a variety of the SSH. While this turn made economics less uniquely insular, as of today economics remains the least outward-looking discipline with management among all SSH. Furthermore, unlike in the other major social sciences, the most influential journals in economics have not significantly contributed to the recent increase in the interdisciplinarity of the discipline. While economics is changing, it is too soon to claim that it has completed an interdisciplinary turn.

In the fall of 2018, The US National Science Foundation (NSF) implemented a new policy on sexual harassment. A few months later, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), took a further step in the fight against harassment by announcing that researchers accused of harassment, but not yet found guilty, could nonetheless be excluded from the lists of potential reviewers of submitted projects. We also observe a recent tendency to call for the retraction of published peer-reviewed results on the basis that their conclusions are considered to go against the moral convictions of some social groups, though the lack of validity of the results has not been proven. It is certainly a legitimate question to ask whether these kinds of policies and moral critiques, which directly link the practice of science to the moral behavior of the scientists in the larger society, do not initiate a profound transformation in the relations between science and society by adding to the usually implicit norms governing the scientific community a new form of moralization of the scientists themselves. We analyze these recent events in terms of a new process of moralization of science and ask whether these new rules of conduct may lead to doing better or more robust science.

In a recent letter to QSS, Kyle Siler (2021), made harsh comments against the decision of the editors to publish a controversial paper signed by Alessandro Strumia (2021) about gender differences in high-energy physics. My aim here is to point to the elements in Siler’s letter that are typical of a new tendency to replace rational and technical arguments with a series of moral statements and ex cathedra affirmations that are not supported by cogent arguments. Such an approach can only be detrimental to rational debates within the bibliometric research community.

This study analyses the patenting activities of university science and engineering professors in Canada between 1920 and 1975. Unlike most studies on commercial activities in academia, which typically focus on the post-1980 period and on university practices, we focus on the pre-1980 period and on the individual decisions of professors to patent their inventions. Based on quantitative patent data, we show that patenting, and thus professors’ interest in the possible commercial value of their scientific discoveries made in university laboratories, was relatively common on an individual and informal basis well before the 1980s and the advent of what is now called “academic capitalism”. This contradicts the belief that before that period, universities were a kind of ivory towers in which professors isolated themselves from external influences and engaged only in pure and disinterested research.

This paper explores intellectual and social proximity among scholarly journals by using network fusion techniques. Similarities among journals are initially represented by means of a three-layer network based on co-citations, common authors and common editors. The information contained in the three layers is then combined by building a fused similarity network. The fusion consists in an unsupervised process that exploits the structural properties of the layers. Subsequently, partial distance correlations are adopted for measuring the contribution of each layer to the structure of the fused network. Finally, the community morphology of the fused network is explored by using modularity. In the three fields considered (i.e. economics, information and library sciences and statistics) the major contribution to the structure of the fused network arises from editors. This result suggests that the role of editors as gatekeepers of journals is the most relevant in defining the boundaries of scholarly communities. In information and library sciences and statistics, the clusters of journals reflect sub-field specializations. In economics, clusters of journals appear to be better interpreted in terms of alternative methodological approaches.