Metaknowledge
Abstract
The growth of electronic publication and informatics archives makes it possible to harvest vast quantities of knowledge about knowledge, or “metaknowledge.” We review the expanding scope of metaknowledge research, which uncovers regularities in scientific claims and infers the beliefs, preferences, research tools, and strategies behind those regularities. Metaknowledge research also investigates the effect of knowledge context on content. Teams and collaboration networks, institutional prestige, and new technologies all shape the substance and direction of research. We argue that as metaknowledge grows in breadth and quality, it will enable researchers to reshape science—to identify areas in need of reexamination, reweight former certainties, and point out new paths that cut across revealed assumptions, heuristics, and disciplinary boundaries.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Already a Subscriber?Sign In
References and Notes
1
Swanson D. R., Medical literature as a potential source of new knowledge. Bull. Med. Libr. Assoc. 78, 29 (1990).
2
Swanson D. R., Smalheiser N. R., An interactive system for finding complementary literatures: A stimulus to scientific discovery. Artif. Intell. 91, 183 (1997).
3
Michel J.-B., et al., Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books. Science 331, 176 (2011); 10.1126/science.1199644.
4
Jones B. F., Wuchty S., Uzzi B., Multi-university research teams: Shifting impact, geography, and stratification in science. Science 322, 1259 (2008); 10.1126/science.1158357.
5
Evans J. A., Electronic publication and the narrowing of science and scholarship. Science 321, 395 (2008).
6
Dovring K., Quantitative semantics in 18th century Sweden. Public Opin. Q. 18, 389 (1954).
7
J. Leskovec, L. Backstrom, J. Kleinberg, in Proceedings of the 15th Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, Paris, 28 June to 1 July 2009.
8
Griffiths T. L., Steyvers M., Finding scientific topics. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101 (suppl. 1), 5228 (2004).
9
Mane K. K., Börner K., Mapping topics and topic bursts in PNAS. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101 (suppl. 1), 5287 (2004).
10
Rzhetsky A., Zheng T., Weinreb C., Self-correcting maps of molecular pathways. PLoS ONE 1, e61 (2006).
11
Krieger C. J., et al., MetaCyc: A multiorganism database of metabolic pathways and enzymes. Nucleic Acids Res. 32 (database issue), D438 (2004).
12
Renear A. H., Palmer C. L., Strategic reading, ontologies, and the future of scientific publishing. Science 325, 828 (2009).
13
B. Cronin, H. B. E. Atkins, The Web of Knowledge: A Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Garfield (Information Today Inc., Medford, NJ, 2000).
14
Bollen J., et al., Clickstream data yields high-resolution maps of science. PLoS ONE 4, e4803 (2009).
15
Ginsberg J., et al., Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data. Nature 457, 1012 (2009).
16
J. Pratt, J. Rhine, B. Smith, C. Stuart, J. Greenwood, Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years: A Critical Appraisal of the Research in Extra-Sensory Perception (Holt, New York, 1940).
17
Glass G. V., Smith M. L., Educ. Eval. Policy Anal. 1, 2 (1979).
18
Greenberg S. A., How citation distortions create unfounded authority: Analysis of a citation network. BMJ 339, b2680 (2009).
19
J. E. Hunter, F. L. Schmidt, Methods of Meta-Analysis: Correcting Error and Bias in Research Findings (Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, ed. 2, 2004).
20
Cochrane Collaboration Reviewer’s Handbook, www.cochrane.org/training/cochrane-handbook.
21
S. M. Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty Before 1900 (Belknap/Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1986).
22
Pearson K., Br. Med. J. 3, 1243 (1904).
23
O’Rourke K., An historical perspective on meta-analysis: Dealing quantitatively with varying study results. J. R. Soc. Med. 100, 579 (2007).
24
Hedges L. V., Modeling publication selection effects in meta-analysis. Stat. Sci. 7, 246 (1992).
25
Ioannidis J. P., Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Med. 2, e124 (2005).
26
Gerber A. S., Malhotra N., Publication bias in empirical sociological research: Do arbitrary significance levels distort published results? Sociol. Methods Res. 37, 3 (2008).
27
Rzhetsky A., Iossifov I., Loh J. M., White K. P., Microparadigms: Chains of collective reasoning in publications about molecular interactions. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 103, 4940 (2006).
28
Shwed U., Bearman P. S., The temporal structure of scientific consensus formation. Am. Sociol. Rev. 75, 817 (2010).
29
Cokol M., Iossifov I., Weinreb C., Rzhetsky A., Emergent behavior of growing knowledge about molecular interactions. Nat. Biotechnol. 23, 1243 (2005).
30
Cokol M., Rodriguez-Esteban R., Rzhetsky A., A recipe for high impact. Genome Biol. 8, 406 (2007).
31
Ioannidis J. P., Trikalinos T. A., Early extreme contradictory estimates may appear in published research: The Proteus phenomenon in molecular genetics research and randomized trials. J. Clin. Epidemiol. 58, 543 (2005).
32
Cokol M., Iossifov I., Rodriguez-Esteban R., Rzhetsky A., How many scientific papers should be retracted? EMBO Rep. 8, 422 (2007).
33
Ioannidis J. P., Contradicted and initially stronger effects in highly cited clinical research. JAMA 294, 218 (2005).
34
T. S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1977).
35
Tversky A., Kahneman D., Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science 185, 1124 (1974).
36
Solomon M., Scientific rationality and human reasoning. Philos. Sci. 59, 439 (1992).
37
D. L. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2008).
38
Henrich J., Heine S. J., Norenzayan A., The weirdest people in the world? Behav. Brain Sci. 33, 61 (2010).
39
M. E. Harris, Ed., Ways of Knowing: New Approaches in the Anthropology of Experience and Learning (Berghahn, Oxford, 2007).
40
Martin E., The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles. Signs 16, 485 (1991).
41
Barnhardt R., Indigenous knowledge systems and Alaska native ways of knowing. Anthropol. Educ. Q. 36, 8 (2005).
42
K. Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999).
43
R. Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Belknap/Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998).
44
Wuchty S., Jones B. F., Uzzi B., The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge. Science 316, 1036 (2007); 10.1126/science.1136099.
45
Newman M. E. J., Scientific collaboration networks. I. Network construction and fundamental results. Phys. Rev. E 64, 016131 (2001).
46
Newman M. E. J., Scientific collaboration networks. II. Shortest paths, weighted networks, and centrality. Phys. Rev. E 64, 016132 (2001).
47
Newman M. E. J., Coauthorship networks and patterns of scientific collaboration. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 101 (suppl. 1), 5200 (2004).
48
D. J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Knopf, New York, ed. 1, 1978).
49
T. Lenoir, Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines (Stanford Univ. Press, Stanford, CA, 1997).
50
P. Coffey, Cathedrals of Science: The Personalities and Rivalries That Made Modern Chemistry (Oxford Univ. Press, London, 2008).
51
S. Allesina, http://arxiv.org/abs/0911.0344 (2009).
52
S. Thurner, R. Hanel, http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.4324 (2010).
53
Evans J. A., Industry collaboration, scientific sharing, and the dissemination of knowledge. Soc. Stud. Sci. 40, 757 (2010).
54
Armstrong E. M., Carpenter D. P., Hojnacki M., Whose deaths matter? Mortality, advocacy, and attention to disease in the mass media. J. Health Polit. Policy Law 31, 729 (2006).
55
Evans J. A., Reimer J., Open access and global participation in science. Science 323, 1025 (2009).
56
myExperiment, www.myexperiment.org.
57
The Polymath Blog, http://polymathprojects.org.
58
Zooniverse, www.zooniverse.org/home.
59
WolframAlpha, www.wolframalpha.com.
60
Evangelou E., Trikalinos T. A., Ioannidis J. P., Unavailability of online supplementary scientific information from articles published in major journals. FASEB J. 19, 1943 (2005).
61
Foote R., Mathematics and complex systems. Science 318, 410 (2007).
62
Collins H. M., The TEA set: Tacit knowledge and scientific networks. Sci. Stud. 4, 165 (1974).
63
Fruchterman T. M. J., Reingold E. M., Graph drawing by force-directed placement. Softw. Pract. Exper. 21, 1129 (1991).
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Science
Volume 331 | Issue 6018
11 February 2011
11 February 2011
Copyright
Copyright © 2011, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Published in print: 11 February 2011
Acknowledgments
This research benefited from NSF grant 0915730 and responses at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Institute for Computing in Science (ICiS) workshop “Integrating, Representing, and Reasoning over Human Knowledge: A Computational Grand Challenge for the 21st Century.” We thank K. Brown, E. A. Cartmill, M. Cartmill, and two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments on this essay.
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Article Usage
Altmetrics
Citations
Export citation
Select the format you want to export the citation of this publication.
Cited by
- Communication bibliometric research in Latin American scientific journals (2009-2018), Comunicar, 30, 70, (2022).https://doi.org/10.3916/C70-2022-07
- Examining the characteristics of impactful research topics: A case of three decades of HIV-AIDS research, Journal of Informetrics, 15, 1, (101122), (2021).https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2020.101122
- Towards medical knowmetrics: representing and computing medical knowledge using semantic predications as the knowledge unit and the uncertainty as the knowledge context, Scientometrics, 126, 7, (6225-6251), (2021).https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-03880-8
- undefined, Creativity and Cognition, (1-5), (2021).https://doi.org/10.1145/3450741.3465244
- Not by transmission alone: the role of invention in cultural evolution, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376, 1828, (2021).https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0049
- Metaknowledge Extraction Based on Multi-Modal Documents, IEEE Access, (1-1), (2021).https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3068728
- Science of science, Science, 359, 6379, (2021)./doi/10.1126/science.aao0185
- Data-driven predictions in the science of science, Science, 355, 6324, (477-480), (2021)./doi/10.1126/science.aal4217
- Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact, Science, 354, 6312, (2021)./doi/10.1126/science.aaf5239
- Quantifying Long-Term Scientific Impact, Science, 342, 6154, (127-132), (2021)./doi/10.1126/science.1237825
- See more
Loading...
View Options
Get Access
Log in to view the full text
AAAS login provides access to Science for AAAS Members, and access to other journals in the Science family to users who have purchased individual subscriptions.
- Become a AAAS Member
- Activate your AAAS ID
- Purchase Access to Other Journals in the Science Family
- Account Help
Log in via OpenAthens.
Log in via Shibboleth.
More options
Purchase digital access to this article
Download and print this article for your personal scholarly, research, and educational use.
Buy a single issue of Science for just $15 USD.
View options
PDF format
Download this article as a PDF file
Download PDF