The science of science, like metascience, encompasses research from disparate disciplines and research methodologies. Given its importance for science policymaking it has sparked the government’s creation of the UK Metascience Unit. Drawing on research from his new book, Alexander Krauss argues that for the science of science to be effective, it needs to integrate many relevant perspectives into a coherent field.

Science of science (an unexpected combination of terms at first glance) is a field that involves scientists doing science to understand science. The field uses scientific evidence to explain what science is, how it works and how to improve it. Yet, for different disciplines it means different things.

For methodologists and statisticians, it means studying the constraints and assumptions of scientific methods that they themselves adopt. For sociologists and psychologists, it involves studying the biases and norms in science that they themselves can be influenced by. For scientometricians and network scientists, it means studying publications and citation patterns in science by producing publications that they expect will be cited. For evolutionary biologists, it entails studying the evolution of our mind and its abilities to reason and perceive the world that they themselves have also inherited.

The field uses scientific evidence to explain what science is, how it works and how to improve it. Yet, for different disciplines it means different things.

How did we start science? Why did science evolve the way it did? What forces drive science and new advances? What are the present limits of science and how can we push those limits? And how can we make science better? It is key that we understand the what, how, when and why of science, if we hope to do better science. These are some of the questions addressed in my new, open access book Science of Science. Science is at the foundation of modern society, but a lack of consensus, and existing studies that take disciplinary perspectives, may be constraining science and our understanding of it.

Scientists focus on producing results, evidence and theories. Rarely do they have the time to take a step back and study deeper questions about the foundations and present boundaries of science and what we know, about what enables and constrains the knowledge we acquire and the methods and instruments we use to acquire that knowledge. If they did they would find science to be a highly complex and multidimensional phenomenon. One that resists explanation from any one disciplinary perspective.

To understand the environment and climate change for example, environmental sciences combine methods and evidence from ecology, physics, chemistry, physical geography, natural resource management, economics and atmospheric science. To understand the human body, medical sciences integrate methods and evidence from biomedicine, genetics, physiology, epidemiology, neuroscience, nutrition science and biostatistics. Taking an interdisciplinary approach is also the only way we can comprehensively understand a system as complex as science and its foundations and limits. There is no way around it. As we have not yet taken an integrated approach to studying science, we do not yet understand well what the foundations of science are and what drives science, at least not nearly as well as we understand the foundations and driving forces of the environment and the human body.

By integrating the diverse fields together, we are able to identify a common mechanism that underlies the different factors studied across all these fields, namely our methods and instruments.

We cannot address most questions about the nature of science by adopting a unidisciplinary approach, for example applying only scientometrics or philosophy of science. By integrating the diverse fields together, we are able to identify a common mechanism that underlies the different factors studied across all these fields, namely our methods and instruments. We depend on cognitive science to be able to explain how our cognitive and methodological abilities enable us to observe, reason, experiment and acquire knowledge about the world, and how our mind and senses present constraints on how we perceive and understand the world. We rely on methodology and statistics to be able to explain how we advance science by reducing such constraints and developing new methods and instruments, such as new experimental techniques and radio telescopes, that expand our perspectives on the world.

The central challenge of the field is thus integrating the different knowledge across disciplines into a holistic field and uncovering this general mechanism driving science across fields. The idea is that by better understanding the foundations of science we can reduce the constraints and biases that we and our scientific methods and instruments face to advance science and push its present boundaries.

Ultimately, the idea is simple: if we better understand science, we can better improve science. 

The book takes a meta-approach to tackling these fundamental questions about science, metascience and how to improve science. To improve how science is done, the UK government also recently created the UK Metascience Unit that aims to tackle related metascience questions and run experiments that test the effectiveness of research funding, oversee metascience grants and disseminate metascience findings. The unit aims to improve the ways in which research is conducted, distributed and funded (all topics covered in the book), and could set the standard for government-led science of science initiatives.

Ultimately, the idea is simple: if we better understand science, we can better improve science. The hope is that the science of science will emerge as an integrated field that incorporates the range of subfields that study science, just as the environmental sciences and medical sciences have helped overcome previously fragmented and disconnected areas of knowledge.

Alexander’s book, Science of Science: Understanding the Foundations and Limits of Science from an Interdisciplinary Perspective, is published with Oxford University Press.

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