In this article I discuss Burawoy’s (2005) argument for public sociology in the context of the sociologist as both citizen and as social scientist; that is, as simultaneously a member of any ‘society’ being researched and as researcher claiming validity for the knowledge produced by research. I shall suggest that the relation between citizenship and social science necessarily places a limit on ...

Professor Webster received his B.Sc. in Social Sciences in 1974 at the Polytechnic of the South Bank, then earned his Ph.D. in the Sociology of Science at the University of York in 1981. He is currently Professor in the Sociology of Science and Technology, Director of the Science and Technology Studies Unit (SATSU), and Academic Coordinator for the Social Sciences at the University of York. Fro...

the aim of present study is providing an explanation of the roles that different aspects of the science nature play in teaching science. through a holistic attitude according to complexity theory, it is argued that raising philosophical questions in history, sociology, and psychology helps in clarifying the nature of science. according to the findings, there is a need for a revision in the indu...

In this paper, two new methods, Temporal evolution of Detrended Cross-Correlation Analysis (TDCCA) and Temporal evolution of Detrended Partial-Cross-Correlation Analysis (TDPCCA), are proposed by generalizing DCCA and DPCCA. Applying TDCCA/TDPCCA, it is possible to study correlations on multi-time scales and over different periods. To illustrate their properties, we used two climatological exam...

Bruno Latour is a vehement critic of the sociology of knowledge in general, and the Strong Program in particular. For those who are familiar with his books Science in Action (Latour, 1987), The Pasteurization of France (Latour, 1988) and We Have Never Been Modern (Latour, 1993) the pivotal role played by these criticisms in Latour’s writing will be evident. To those who only know his work by re...

Pickering (1992, p. 1) speaks of the field now commonly called sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) as "a new approach to thinking about science" that differentiated itself from contemporary philosophy and sociology of science in two ways: first, in that "scientific knowledge itself had to be understood as a social product"; and second, in that "SSK was determinedly empirical and naturalisti...

Do Article Influence scores overestimate the citation impact of social science journals in subfields that are related to higher-impact natural science disciplines? Unlike Impact Factors (IF), Article Influence (AI) scores assign greater weight to citations that appear in highly cited journals. The natural sciences tend to have higher citation rates than the social sciences. We might therefore e...