Metascience (research)

Metascience refers to the systematic investigation of the scientific enterprise, in other words, the use of scientific methodology to study science itself.

## Contents

* 1 History
* 2 Scientific Data Science
* 3 In the Popular Press
* 4 See also
* 5 References
* 6 External links
* 6.1 Journals

## History

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, metascience consists of "inquiry into the methodology and philosophical implications of scientific investigation," and was first introduced by C.W. Morris in 1938. They write:

> -- We may introduce the term ‘metascience’ as a synonym for ‘the science of science.’

Other sources suggest that the term may have been in use as far back as the late 19th century.[1] In recent years, use of the term has gained momentum in the context of the "reproducibility crisis." Specifically, researchers have used "metascience" as a broad term to describe efforts to both characterize the validity of a given body of research (say, for example, the reliability of published drug targets[2]) as well as efforts to reform journalistic practices, incentive structures, and statistical methods. [3][4]

The journal Metascience is published by the Springer-Nature Group, and serves the metascientific research community. The journal published reviews of books in the history of science, philosophy of science, sociology of science, and science studies. The journal originated in Australia, and over the years has had a variety of editors, including Steven French, Stathis Psillos, and Theodore Arabatzis. It is now edited by K. Brad Wray and Luciano Boschiero.[Note: see link to webpage: https://link.springer.com/journal/11016]

## Scientific Data Science

Metascience encompasses both qualitative and quantitative methods. A sub-discipline of metascience that is unique to the modern era is scientific data science, or the use of data science to analyse research papers themselves. Research in scientific data science ranges from fraud detection, [5] to citation network analysis, [6] to developing novel metrics for assessing research impact. [7]

## In the Popular Press

The website FiveThirtyEight uses the tag "meta-science"[8] for many of its posts covering controversies and developments in contemporary science.

## See also

* Epistemology
* Science policy
* Science of science policy
* Scientific method
* Sociology of knowledge
* Sociology of scientific knowledge
* Knowledge management
* Data science
* Reproducibility

## References

1. ↑ "Google Books: Metascience". https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=metascience.
2. ↑ "Believe it or not: how much can we rely on published data on potential drug targets?". http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v10/n9/full/nrd3439-c1.html.
3. ↑ "The Infancy of Metascience". https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26751.
4. ↑ "A manifesto for reproducible science". http://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-016-0021.
5. ↑ Markowitz, David M.; Hancock, Jeffrey T. (2016). "Linguistic obfuscation in fraudulent science". Journal of Language and Social Psychology 35 (4): 435-445. doi:10.1177/0261927X15614605. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0261927X15614605. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
6. ↑ Ding, Y. (2010). "Applying weighted PageRank to author citation networks". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 62 (2): 236-245. doi:10.1002/asi.21452. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.21452/full. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
7. ↑ Zhu, X.; Turney, P.; Lemire, D.; Vellino, A. (2015). "Measuring academic influence: Not all citations are equal". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 66 (2): 408-427. doi:10.1002/asi.23179. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.21452/full. Retrieved 2017-02-10.
8. ↑ Meta-Science - FiveThirtyEight

## External links

### Journals

* Metascience
* Social Studies of Science
* Science & Technology Studies
* Technology in Society
* Research Policy
* Minerva: A Journal of Science, Learning and Policy
* Science Technology and Society
* Science and Public Policy

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