Invisible college

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The Invisible College refers to both a historical institution (Invisible College (organisation)) and a sociological concept. This page focuses on the concept and its history, usage and utility. The concept is distinct from other similar concepts such as Epistemic Communities or Thought Collectives.

In her study of the terrorism research field, Edna Reid describes how terrorism research at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies developed over the years in collaboration with other right-wing research centres and think-tanks to form "an invisible college of terrorism researchers":

During the 1970s, governments, international organizations, and research centers such as the RAND Corporation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Georgetown University, and the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University…sponsored numerous terrorism conferences, research projects, specialized anthologies, study groups, and official inquiries into terrorism. The efforts helped to nurture terrorism research and create numerous forums which allowed cross-fertilization of ideas, sharing of resources, and creation of an invisible college of terrorism researchers. [1]


Contending concepts

Articles from Google Scholar on the spread of ideas[2]
Discourse coalition Epistemic community Invisible college Thought collective
742/1,750 8,040/16,100 7,250/11,100 1,340/1,690

The four concepts are all widely used in scholarly work seeking to understand how ides cohere and spread or decline. The concepts are often used in isolation from each other. It is clear that the concept of epistemic community is used more often than contending concepts - at least in relation to the overall holdings of Google Scholar.

Bibliography

A compilation of work on the concept of the invisible college.[3]

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  • Chubin, D. (1976). The conceptualization of scientific specialties. The Sociological Quarterly, 17, 448-476.
  • Chubin, D. E. (1985). Beyond invisible colleges: inspirations and aspirations of post-1972 social studies of science. Scientometrics, 7(3-6), 221-254.
  • Crane, D. (1969). Social structure in a group of scientists: a test of the "invisible college" hypothesis. American Sociological Review, 34, 335-352.
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  • Kinsella, W. J. (1998). Communication and the construction of knowledge in a scientific community: an interpretive study of the Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ.
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  • Kretschmer, H. (1997). Patterns of behaviour in co-authorship networks of invisible colleges. Scientometrics, 40, 579-591.
  • Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts (Revised ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Laudel, G. (2001). What do we measure by co-authorships? In M. Davis & C. S. Wilson (Eds.) Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics (pp. 369-384). Sydney, Australia: Bibliometrics & Informetrics Research Group.
  • Lievrouw, L. A. (1990). Reconciling structure and process in the study of scholarly communication. In C. L. Borgman (Ed.), Scholarly communication and bibliometrics (pp. 59-69). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
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  • Lingwood, D. A. (1969). Interpersonal communication, research productivity and invisible colleges. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, Stanford, California.
  • Matzat, U. (2004). Academic Communication and Internet Discussion Groups: transfer of Information or Creation of Social Contacts? Social Networks, 26 (3), 221-255.
  • McCain, K. W. (1990). Mapping authors in intellectual space: a technical overview. Journal of the American society for information science, 41, 433-443.
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  • Merz, M. (1998). 'Nobody can force you when you are across the ocean' - Face to face and e-mail exchanges between theoretical physicists. In C. Smith & J. Agar (Eds.), Making space for science. Territorial themes in the shaping of knowledge (pp. 313-329). London: Macmillan.
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  • Price, D. J. de Solla. (1963). Little science, big science. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Price, D. J. de Solla. (1971). Some remarks on elitism in information and the invisible college phenomenon in science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 22, 74-75.
  • Price, D. J. de Solla. (1986). Little science, big science ... and beyond. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Rousseau, R. & Zuccala, A. (2004). A classification of author cocitations: Definitions and search strategies. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55, 513-529.
  • Sandstrom, P. E. (1998). Information foraging among anthropologists in the invisible college of human behavioral ecology: an author cocitation analysis. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
  • Taylor, R. S. (1991). Information use environments. In B. Dervin & M. J. Voigt (Eds.), Progress in communication sciences, vol.10 (pp. 217-255). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp.
  • Tuire, P. & Erno, P. (2001). Exploring invisible scientific communities: studying networking relations within an educational research community. A Finnish case. Higher Education, 42, 493-513.
  • Van Rossum, W. (1973). Informal communication and the development of scientific fields. Social Science Information,12, 63-75.
  • White, H. D. (2003). Author cocitation analysis and Pearson’s r. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 54, 1250-1259.
  • White, H. D., & McCain, K. W. (1998). Visualizing a discipline: an author cocitation analysis of information science, 1972-1995. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49, 327-55.
  • White, H. D., Wellman, B. & Nazer, N. (2004). Does citation reflect social structure? Longitudinal evidence from the "Globenet" interdisciplinary research group. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55, 111-126.
  • Zuccala, A. (2004). Revisiting the invisible college: a case study of the intellectual structure and social process of Singularity Theory research in mathematics. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.

Notes

  1. Edna F. Reid, Hsinchun Chen, ‘Mapping the contemporary terrorism research domain’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 65 (2007) 42–56
  2. Search conducted on Google Scholar from the UK on Thursday 24 May 2012 @ 12.50 hrs approx. Search terms = First number: "Discourse coalition"; "Epistemic community"; "Invisible college"; "Thought collective". Second number: "Discourse coalition" OR "Discourse Coalitions"; "Epistemic community" OR "Epistemic communities"; "Invisible college" OR "Invisible colleges"; "Thought collective" OR "Thought collectives"
  3. Sources include: Alesia Zuccala, Modeling the Invisible College Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Volume 57 Issue 2, January 2006 Pages 152 - 168