Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand. The author reviews evidence of such a bias in a variety of guises and gives examples of its operation in several practical contexts. Possible explanations are considered, and the question of its utility or disutility is discussed. When men wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into their service! (Mackay, 1852/ 1932, p. 552) Confirmation bias is perhaps the best known and most widely accepted notion of inferential error to come out of the literature on human reasoning. (Evans, 1989, p. 41) If one were to attempt to identify a single problematic aspect of human reasoning that deserves attention above all others, the confirmation bias would have to be among the candidates for consideration. Many have written about this bias, and it appears to be sufficiently strong and pervasive that one is led to wonder whether the bias, by itself, might account for a significant fraction of the disputes, altercations, and misunderstandings that occur among individuals, groups, and nations. Confirmation bias has been used in the psychological literature to refer to a variety of phenomena. Here I take the term to represent a generic concept that subsumes several more specific ideas that connote the inappropriate bolstering of hypotheses or beliefs whose truth is in question.

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The question of exactly how science is commercialized is an important one. While the social structures of “science ” and “technology ” are distinctive, recent work suggests that scientific and technological ideas in fact co-evolve. This paper addresses the dynamics of such co-evolution: are scientific networks deeply co-mingled with networks through which technology is created and if so how? It does so in a study of an emerging area of biomedicine—tissue engineering. The research is based on a novel methodology that takes advantage of the fact that an idea is often inscribed in both a patent and paper, thus forming a patent– paper pair. Starting with the pair, it is possible to trace the citation network of patents, papers, inventors and authors, combining traditional bibliometric analysis with in-depth interviews to provide new insights. The results show that for this case there exist distinctive scientific and technological networks. Furthermore, while there is evidence of overlap, it is neither co-publishing nor citation as might be predicted from current literature. Rather co-mingling exists through founding, licensing, consulting and advising. This has implications for our understanding of the processes through which spillovers arise, the way in which commercialization and technology transfer should be structured and for recent debates on conflict of interest in biomedicine.

Through use of social worlds theory and qualitative research methods, this thesis explores hackers ’ practices and their relationships with the computing world and the wider society from a socio-technical perspective. The hacker social world comprises actors from diverse social-technical backgrounds who share a constellation of im/material practices, namely open source practices (OSPs). Through engaging with these collective practices, actors and actants communicate, negotiate, and shape each other’s identities, practices and understandings of the innovation structure and system in various aspects. In examining the diverse articulations and performances in which hacker culture and hacker identity are both reflected and constructed, the thesis tries to contextualise and deconstruct the ICT architecture we take for granted, as well as the innovations made possible by this architecture. The major findings of my research are: 1) As a community of open source practices, the FLOSS social world allows diverse actors to engage in the

This paper provides a framework with which to model one of the key links between universities and industry -- the undertaking of applied research. We assume that the fundamental objective of universities is to undertake fundamental research and that they receive public funding to do so. Nevertheless, faced with tight budget constraints, universities may have incentives to allow their staff to spend some of their time on income-generating activities such as applied research or consultancy. For this opens up two channels by which universities can ease their budget constraint: (i) by allowing academics to supplement their income, universities will not have to pay such high salaries; (ii) they can effectively tax the income that academics raise through applied research or consultancy -- for example through the imposition "overhead charges". By easing their budget constraint, universities may be able to take on sufficient extra staff that they increase the amount of fundamental research that they can achieve with the given public budget. The paper develops a model of this link between universities and firms and uses it to determine optimal "tax" that universities should impose on applied research income.

More and more academic journals adopt an open-access policy, by which articles are accessible free of charge through the Internet, while publication costs are recovered through author fees. We study the consequences of this policy on the journal’s quality standards. We show that if the journal is run by a not-for-profit association that aims at maximizing the utility of its members, the move to open-access may result in a decrease of quality standards below the socially efficient level.

This paper addresses the invisible college concept with the intent of developing a consensus regarding its definition. Emphasis is placed on the term as it was defined and used in Derek de Solla Price’s (1963; 1986) work and reviewed on the basis of its thematic progress in past research over the years. Special attention is given to Lievrouw’s (1990) article concerning the structure versus social process problem to show that both conditions are essential to the invisible college and both may be reconciled. A new definition of the invisible college is also introduced, including a proposed research model. With this model, researchers are encouraged to study the invisible college by focusing on three critical components – the subject specialty, the scientists as social actors, and the Information Use Environment (IUE).

to develop conceptual tools and measures enabling a better understanding of the impacts of scientific research on desired social outcomes. This monograph summarizes progress in developing theory and method for assessing the public values aspects of science outcomes. The critical problem for understanding the social impacts of science is that we have no satisfactory tools for understanding how these largest-scale social impacts occur and, by implication, few useful guideposts for “managing ” their occurrence. A maintained assumption in our study is that traditional R&D evaluation and planning are inappropriate for analysis of public Big Science and its social impacts, and the reason is simple: In national science policies seeking grand scale social impacts, science is only one of the players and not always the most important one. Any approach that focuses on scientific inputs and outputs and resources developed and expended by scientists but fails to focus on other important actors will result in an incomplete or misleading inferences about social outcomes and their causality. Science is not a self-contained institution and very few if any of the major social transformations occur because of science. Social outcomes and transformations do

This paper introduces a distinction between two different types of information goods in order to analyse the processes governing the review and integration of multi-authored contributions to information goods such as those produced through collaborations using the Internet as well as modular information goods such as open source software. It is argued that these distinctions are important because they suggest different organisational arrangements for producing such information goods. This method of analysing the nature of the information goods is employed to examine different organisational arrangements using the analogy of collaboration for traditional publication to identify actors and processes. The analysis of ‘contributors ’ is extended from authorship to collectors and researchers. The paper examines a small survey of the governance procedures employed in projects that employ open source methods for collecting various types of information. We noted the prime role of the recruitment process in the relative success of the examples that we examined (ODP, Wikipedia, Nupedia, MathLearning, VRoma, and Web of Life). For these ‘collection ’ efforts, the role of hierarchy in editing and review of project submissions appears to be important than in open source communities and may be an impediment to recruitment and project development. A number of directions for further research are identified.

Contents, #34, p.3-11, August 21,1989 EUGENE GARFIELD NSTITLITE FOR SCIENTFIC NFORMATiON* 3,501 MARKET ST,PHILADELPHIA PA 19104 Linus Pauling: An Appreciation of a World Citizen-Scientist and Citation Laureate Go to Reprint In tribute to Linus Pauling... Number 34 August 21, 1989 The life and works of Nobel laureate Linus Pauling are examined. Using ISI data, Pauling's scien- tific endeavors are reviewed, including a discussion of his most-cited works and his recent research involving quasicrystals. Pauling's comments on a wide range of topics--from the mechanisms of scientific discovery to the notion of scientists as political activists--are also included. The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men. --Oliver Wendell Holmes Linus Pauling. For a great number of people -especially scientists--this name brings instant recognition. Pauling is one of the most written-about scientists of this century. Few people can claim to have