Malena Méndez Isla

As scholarly publishing becomes increasingly commodified, market-oriented definitions of excellence are reshaping the organization and hierarchization of scientific knowledge. Using a sociology of elites framework, this article examines how the social conditions under which knowledge is produced, evaluated, and circulated shape epistemic inequalities. It focuses on journal editors—who play a central role in defining legitimate knowledge—but remain understudied as holders of scientific and editorial authority. Through the prosopographic and bibliometric analysis of 229 editors from 97 leading biology journals, we investigate whether editorial authority is structured primarily by scientific authority, market-oriented authority, or a combination of both. We examine how editors’ sociodemographic characteristics and scientific, institutional, international, and extra-academic capital relate to journal characteristics and research topics. The findings reveal a dual structure of editorial authority: editors with strong scientific and institutional capital are associated with historically less valued specialties, such as marine biology and animal science. By contrast, younger, often women, professional editors are more frequently associated with commercial journals publishing research on highly marketable topics, such as cancer biology and immunology. The article contributes to the sociology of scientific knowledge by showing that epistemic inequalities are not produced solely through unequal distribution of scientific resources. They also arise through the interaction between scientific and market-oriented forms of authority within the editorial field. The increasing commodification of scholarly publishing therefore reconfigures the principles governing the legitimation and hierarchization of knowledge, while introducing market-based definitions of relevance and excellence alongside—and sometimes in tension with—established scientific ones.

This study examines how research agendas in neuroscience have evolved over time. Drawing on a large-scale bibliometric and topic modeling analysis of 3 million scientific publications and 20 thousand patents, we show that agenda-setting neuroscience is dependent on both authors’ institutional affiliation and the possibility of commercialization of research through patenting. Using data from the Web of Science and USPTO databases, we identify 495 research topics and map their evolution over time by relating topic prevalence and publications’ impact with the type of affiliated and funding institutions, namely universities, governments, firms, hospitals, and nonprofits. Overall, results show a clear division of labor: universities publish, governments fund, and firms patent. However, this structure is shifting over time: we observe a transition from basic research on brain mechanisms toward applied, technology-driven, and patentable domains, particularly in neurodegenerative diseases and neurotechnologies. Furthermore, universities are increasingly patenting, while firms produce fewer but more influential publications. These findings suggest that specific institutional incentives have oriented neuroscience toward commercially viable areas, raising questions about the research priorities and the balance between innovation, public health, and fundamental knowledge production.

This article offers a comprehensive examination of perspectives on university-industry interactions in Latin America. Distinguishing itself from international reviews, the study employs a systematic review of 274 articles across Scopus, Scielo, and Dialnet databases. The research addresses the temporal evolution, disciplinary fields, conceptual approaches, methods, and prevailing topics in the region. Findings reveal a focus on management, economics, business, social sciences, and engineering disciplines. Qualitative methods dominate, while theoretical-conceptual approaches encompass meso-institutional and micro-interactional levels. Key research themes include collaboration results, knowledge transfer, innovation, technological transfer, and collaboration barriers.

Despite the growing importance of interdisciplinary studies for the development of science, quantitative works on the subject are not abundant. Bibliometrics offers tools to analyze interdisciplinarity through a complementary approach to qualitative work. While there is a body of precedents in bibliometrics (1,2,3,4,5,6), methodological proposals for the construction of databases of the intersection of two disciplines are scarce.(7) Thus, a proposal is made to identify an interdisciplinary field with a set of scholarly articles. The objective of this work is to develop a methodology for defining the intersection between the fields of neuroscience and computational science. This area of study is not directly traceable from categorizations in databases. For this reason, three strategies are built to delimit an interdisciplinary corpus and compare the potential and limitations of each of them. The three strategies are focused, on the one hand, on keywords and, on the other hand, on citation and reference patterns using the Web Of Science database. It is found that it is possible to operationalize the interdiscipline with two types of approaches: 1. A semantic approach based on the use of keywords. A relational approach focusing on cross-references and citations between articles from the two disciplines. As a result, a basis for the study of the intersection between the fields of neurosciences and computational sciences from a bibliometric perspective is obtained, and a methodological proposal for the quantitative study of interdiscipline in other areas of knowledge is mad