The role of handbooks in knowledge creation and diffusion: A case of science and technology studies

摘要

Genre is considered to be an important element in scholarly communication andin the practice of scientific disciplines. However, scientometric studies havetypically focused on a single genre, the journal article. The goal of thisstudy is to understand the role that handbooks play in knowledge creation anddiffusion and their relationship with the genre of journal articles,particularly in highly interdisciplinary and emergent social science andhumanities disciplines. To shed light on these questions we focused onhandbooks and journal articles published over the last four decades belongingto the research area of Science and Technology Studies (STS), broadly defined.To get a detailed picture we used the full-text of five handbooks (500,000words) and a well-defined set of 11,700 STS articles. We confirmed themethodological split of STS into qualitative and quantitative (scientometric)approaches. Even when the two traditions explore similar topics (e.g., scienceand gender) they approach them from different starting points. The change incognitive foci in both handbooks and articles partially reflects the changingtrends in STS research, often driven by technology. Using text similaritymeasures we found that, in the case of STS, handbooks play no special role ineither focusing the research efforts or marking their decline. In general, theydo not represent the summaries of research directions that have emerged sincethe previous edition of the handbook.