First round of heavy flavour physics co-nomination survey now launched
This week, we launched the heavy flavour physics co-nomination survey, which is a part of the ‘fields of physics’ experiment. The experiment examines the extent to which the ‘site of accountability’ and the ‘site of knowledge production’ in a research field overlap and effects of this overlap on conditions for high quality research.
We seek to analyse three sub-fields of physics as a part of this experiment. This week, we initiated the survey that aims to map the field of heavy flavour physics. Heavy flavour physics ultimately looks for the evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model by looking for and measuring matter-antimatter symmetries in quarks and other very small particles.
As a result, we are looking to build the map of intellectual influence in the field. Using bibliometric tools to map particle physics is notoriously difficult, because author collectives for experimental articles can number in thousands. Citations, which usually are taken as a proxy of intellectual influence, cannot therefore be attributed to individuals, or even to small groups.
As an alternative approach, co-nomination sampling, a version of snowball sampling, asks members of the field directly about who influences their research. Using the survey format, we aim to identify and map cognitive links between researchers in the field to bypass the usual hurdles of using bibliometric data.
I hope you are looking forward to the results as much as we are.
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Professor Maria Nedeva, Head of Science Dynamics Group and Professor of Science and Innovation Dynamics and Policy, University of Manchester (UK) and Professor of Science Policy, University of Lund (Sweden).
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Dr Duncan Thomas, Lecturer / Assistant Professor (tenured) in Innovation Management and Policy
duncan.thomas@manchester.ac.uk
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Dr Maria Karaulova, Research Associate, R-QUEST
maria.karaulova@manchester.ac.uk
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