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Title: Creative Destruction: The Structural Consequences of Scientific Curation
Communication of scientific findings is fundamental to scholarly discourse. In this article, we show that academic review articles, a quintessential form of interpretive scholarly output, perform curatorial work that substantially transforms the research communities they aim to summarize. Using a corpus of millions of journal articles, we analyze the consequences of review articles for the publications they cite, focusing on citation and co-citation as indicators of scholarly attention. Our analysis shows that, on the one hand, papers cited by formal review articles generally experience a dramatic loss in future citations. Typically, the review gets cited instead of the specific articles mentioned in the review. On the other hand, reviews curate, synthesize, and simplify the literature concerning a research topic. Most reviews identify distinct clusters of work and highlight exemplary bridges that integrate the topic as a whole. These bridging works, in addition to the review, become a shorthand characterization of the topic going forward and receive disproportionate attention. In this manner, formal reviews perform creative destruction so as to render increasingly expansive and redundant bodies of knowledge distinct and comprehensible.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1829240
PAR ID:
10301035
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
American Sociological Review
Volume:
86
Issue:
2
ISSN:
0003-1224
Page Range / eLocation ID:
341 to 376
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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