Although English has become the de-facto universal scientific language, this does not imply that there are no language barriers within the scientific community. On the contrary, people from different disciplines who are using the same tool-a supercomputer-to solve their problems, have great difficulty explaining to each other what exactly they are doing. On the other hand it can be very enlight...

When computational researchers from several domains cooperate, one recurrent problem is finding tools, methods and approaches that can be used across disciplines, to enhance collaboration through reuse. The paper presents our ongoing work to meet the challenges posed by provenance-based retrieval, proposed as a solution for transdisciplinary scientific collaboration via reuse of scientific work...

Why do bad methods persist in some academic disciplines, even when they have been widely rejected others? What factors allow good methodological advances to spread across disciplines? In this paper, we investigate key features determining the success and failure of between sciences. We introduce a formal model that considers like competence reviewer bias toward one’s own methods. show how these...

Whether it be data generated from genomic sequencers, telescopes, or other laboratory instruments, technology apparent in many scientific disciplines is generating data at rates never witnessed before. Scientists in the area of bioinformatics are among the many who perform inductive experiments and analyses on these data with the goal of answering scientific questions. These computationally dem...

The relation between logic and philosophy of science, often taken for granted, is in fact problematic. Although current fashionable criticisms of the usefulness of logic are usually mistaken, there are indeed difficulties which should be taken seriously having to do, amongst other things, with different "scientific mentalities" in the two disciplines (section 1). Nevertheless, logic is, or shou...

Why are some scientific disciplines, such as sociology and psychology, more fragmented into conflicting schools of thought than other fields, such as physics and biology? Furthermore, why does high fragmentation tend to coincide with limited scientific progress? We analyzed a formal model where scientists seek to identify the correct answer to a research question. Each scientist is influenced b...

Nanosynthesis forces a reevaluation of received views on scientific explanation. I discuss the synthesis of anisotropic metal nanoparticles, a typical nanosynthesis research program, in order to demonstrate the failure of standard philosophical accounts of explanation to capture the dynamics of information exchange in synthetic sciences. I argue that using the language of effective heuristics, ...