Matthew L. Wallace

Along with the increased exploration and militarisation of the Canadian Arctic during the cold war came a push for civilian and military research. For the most part, new knowledge was shaped through an increased presence “on the ground”. This paper, however, turns its attention to the Arctic atmosphere as a scientific “space” that emerged during the cold war with the help of new data and technologies – weather stations, aircraft and computers – that allowed the region to be studied both in situ and remotely. In Canada, much of this post-war research was done on the campus of McGill University, where various institutional configurations fostered the development of Arctic research and meteorology. The latter was borne out of a focus on radar and on “stormy weather”. It was expanded to include broad range of expertise in geography, and led to the creation of the Arctic Meteorology Research Group. Taking advantage of favourable conditions at the national, continental and local levels, scientific elites including geographer Kenneth Hare advanced a research agenda focused on the weather and climate of the Arctic. This high-altitude, high-latitude “region” became not only a scientific object in itself, but also the catalyst for a range of Northern and atmospheric research at McGill.

Since outbreaks in 2003, avian influenza has received a considerable amount of funding and become a controversial science policy issue in various respects. Like in many so-called “grand challenges”, a variety of perspectives have emerged over how to “tackle” avian influenza and public voices have expressed concern over how research funds are being allocated. In this article we inquire into the priorities of avian influenza research. We use qualitative and quantitative data to examine the relations between societal demands for public science and the existing “research landscape”. Interviews of a cross-section of stakeholders revealed a diversity of perspectives on existing research and its desired outcomes, and a generalized difficulty to explicitly connect the two. We also observed a lack of a common understanding of priorities for conducting and applying research. Rather than well-defined research agendas, we found that most public avian influenza research is shaped by three institutional contexts: pharmaceutical industry priorities, publishing and public research funding pressures, and the mandates of international and national science-based policy or public health organizations. Our results are significant for informing not only resource allocation issues, but also a broad perspective of research governance that explicitly takes into account underlying incentive structures when defining priorities.

Led by the Meteorological Service of Canada, atmospheric research in Canada underwent a period of rapid growth after the end of the Second World War. Within this federal organization, and in response to operational challenges and staff shortages, there were significant investments in basic research and in research oriented toward external users within Canada. Specifically, new policies and programs were put in place to enable the organization to gain legitimacy within the scientific community and within the federal government. New links with stakeholders and, more importantly, the development of explicit policies to guide research were a prime focus. These formalized strategies for pursuing two parallel types of research generated some internal conflict, but also helped form a common scientific identity among personnel. There were concerted efforts to disseminate research products and reinforce links both with the scientific community and with external users of meteorological and climatological research. Borne out by quantitative data, this science policy–centered history sheds light on the development of research and research specializations in the field in Canada. Most importantly, it provides insight into the global postwar expansion of the atmospheric sciences, which is strongly tied to national contexts. Indeed, the quest for legitimacy and the close connection to government priorities is central to the history of the atmospheric sciences in the twentieth century. More broadly, this case study points to a possible new conception of government science driven by political, bureaucratic, and scientific imperatives, as a means to shed light on scientific networks and practices.

Funding agencies and large public scientific institutions are increasingly using the term “research portfolio” as a means of characterising their research. While portfolios have long been used as a heuristic for managing corporate R&D (i.e., R&D aimed at gaining tangible economic benefits), they remain ill-defined in a science policy context where research is aimed at achieving societal outcomes. In this article we analyze the discursive uses of the term “research portfolio” and propose some general considerations for their application in science policy. We explore the use of the term in private R&D and related scholarly literature in existing science policy practices, and seek insight in relevant literature in science policy scholarship. While the financial analogy can in some instances be instructive, a simple transposition from the world of finance or of corporate R&D to public research is problematic. However, we do identify potentially fruitful uses of portfolio analysis in science policy. In particular, our review suggests that the concept of research portfolio can indeed be a useful analytical instrument for tackling complex societal challenges. Specifically, the strands of scholarship identified suggest that the use of research portfolio should: i) recognize the diversity of research lines relevant for a given societal challenge, given the uncertainty and ambiguity of research outcomes; ii) examine the relationships between research options of a portfolio and the expected societal outcomes; and iii) adopt a systemic perspective to research portfolios – i.e., examine a portfolio as a functional whole, rather than as the sum of the its parts. We argue that with these considerations, portfolio-driven approaches may foster social inclusion in science policy decisions, help deliberation between “alternative” portfolios to tackle complex societal challenges, as well as promote cost-effectiveness and transparency.

Le développement de la recherche sur la modification du temps est un élément central de l’évolution des sciences atmosphériques dans l’après-guerre au Canada. Nous mettons en valeur deux projets de recherche de grande envergure en Alberta et au Québec, dans le contexte d’un déplacement des études sur la modification du temps du laboratoire vers le terrain dans les années 1950 et 1960. Par ce biais, nous montrons comment les milieux naturel, économique, social et politique d’une région sont déterminants pour l’évolution du SMC et des sciences atmosphériques au Canada, deux éléments largement absents de l’historiographie des sciences au Canada. Les travaux sur la modification du temps mettent en évidence les liens avec la sphère politique, la fonction publique canadienne, la communauté scientifique et le secteur privé. Nous caractérisons ainsi les rapports de force dominants qui permettent au SMC de développer, à l’interne et à l’externe, une capacité scientifique au pays. En revanche, cette position du SMC, en tant que « service » gouvernemental déterminé par le mandat précis, accorde une marge de manoeuvre limitée au déroulement de cette recherche.

This paper examines the proximity of authors to those they cite using degrees of separation in a co-author network, essentially using collaboration networks to expand on the notion of self-citations. While the proportion of direct self-citations (including co-authors of both citing and cited papers) is relatively constant in time and across specialties in the natural sciences (10% of references) and the social sciences (20%), the same cannot be said for citations to authors who are members of the co-author network. Differences between fields and trends over time lie not only in the degree of co-authorship which defines the large-scale topology of the collaboration network, but also in the referencing practices within a given discipline, computed by defining a propensity to cite at a given distance within the collaboration network. Overall, there is little tendency to cite those nearby in the collaboration network, excluding direct self-citations. These results are interpreted in terms of small-scale structure, field-specific citation practices, and the value of local co-author networks for the production of knowledge and for the accumulation of symbolic capital. Given the various levels of integration between co-authors, our findings shed light on the question of the availability of ‘arm's length’ expert reviewers of grant applications and manuscripts.

This paper examines the proximity of authors to those they cite using degrees of separation in a co-author network, essentially using collaboration networks to expand on the notion of self-citations. While the proportion of direct self-citations (including co-authors of both citing and cited papers) is relatively constant in time and across specialties in the natural sciences (10% of citations) and the social sciences (20%), the same cannot be said for citations to authors who are members of the co-author network. Differences between fields and trends over time lie not only in the degree of co-authorship which defines the large-scale topology of the collaboration network, but also in the referencing practices within a given discipline, computed by defining a propensity to cite at a given distance within the collaboration network. Overall, there is little tendency to cite those nearby in the collaboration network, excluding direct self-citations. By analyzing these social references, we characterize the social capital of local collaboration networks in terms of the knowledge production within scientific fields. These results have implications for the long-standing debate over biases common to most types of citation analysis, and for understanding citation practices across scientific disciplines over the past 50 years. In addition, our findings have important practical implications for the availability of 'arm's length' expert reviewers of grant applications and manuscripts.