A Scientometric Approach to the Integrated History and Philosophy of Science: Entrenched Biomedical Standardisation and Citation-Exemplar

ABSTRACT

Is Kuhn’s notion of exemplar applicable to ongoing biomedical sciences? Many philosophers may be skeptical because Kuhn’s cases are mostly from physics and chemistry. However, how do philosophers test the above (non-)applicability directly? We will use examples to illustrate a scientometric approach to the integrated history and philosophy of science (SciHPS) and argue that SciHPS can provide an empirical basis to empirically test and revise a philosophical concept questioned for its applicability to biomedical sciences. This paper will build on Yan, K., M. L. Tsai, and T. R. Huang. [2021. “Improving the Quality of Case-Based Research in the Philosophy of Contemporary Sciences.” Synthese 198 (10): 9591–9610. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02657-5] heart-rate variability (HRV) case study to examine the biomedical changes within the HRV community from 1970 to 2022. We will investigate how a task force standardises and entrenches methodological standardisations, and argue that some of the task force’s methodological standardisations are tool-afforded by an algorithm. These tool-afforded aspects further explain why an HRV method is robustly dominant in the HRV community despite other HRV scholars having developed alternatives to compete with the dominant one. We will then show how to use SciHPS to empirically test and revise the Kuhnian concept of exemplar into a concept of citation-exemplar that better captures the above tool-afforded aspects of standardisations.

KEYWORDS:

• Heart-rate variability
• biomedical
• scientometrics
• kuhn
• exemplar
• citation
• standardisation
• tool-afforded
• fast Fourier transform

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For more review on the other five conceptualizations of expertise in the STS literature, please see Grundmann (2017, 32–42).

2 It is worth noting that Yan, Tsai, and Huang (2021, 9607–9608) also proposed a ‘repertoire-based hypothesis' for future investigation, which is based on Ankeny and Leonelli’s (2016) concept of research repertoire. The repertoire-based hypothesis focuses more on the performative, social, financial, and organizational conditions in which a certain style of performing research is established, evolves, and reproduces (Ankeny and Leonelli 2016, 21).

Additional information

Funding

National Science Council Award Number: MOST 109-2410-H-010-013-MY3 | Recipient: Karen Yan, Ph.D.