The evolution of scientific knowledge highlights for scientists and researchers the necessary context to understand the theories, methodology, and impact of their work. Previous studies in the evolution of research domains highlighted major events a.....More
The evolution of scientific knowledge highlights for scientists and researchers the necessary context to understand the theories, methodology, and impact of their work. Previous studies in the evolution of research domains highlighted major events and individuals, corrected errors and contradictions, and detailed the evolution of knowledge in the history of theoretical biology, synthetic biology, and neuroscience. These and other similar analyses articulate the history of a discipline, its problems and methods, and the history of it’s conceptual development. Any text or document on microbiology (or any scientific domain per se), highlights key historical moments including: discoveries, individuals, methodological and technical advancements, and new scientific knowledge. In my dissertation, I conduct a systematic study of the microbiome research domain and concept, in order to explore the nature of conceptual innovation in biomedicine, as well as the dynamics of the social and linguistic change via a a large collection of text documents.
My work identifies the key drivers of change to the microbiome concept focusing on the concepts and social communities of the microbiome research domain as agents. In the first chapter, in contrast to other scholars who have interpreted the microbiome concept as a well-defined agreed-upon term, I provide an overview of the debates surrounding the microbiome and previous attempts to accurately characterize the microbiome. In the second chapter, I argue traditional approaches to measuring and analyzing knowledge within biomedicine, with particular emphasis on systematic reviews, ontologies, and text mining, do not accurately identify or measure changes in knowledge within biomedicine. In the third chapter, I argue for the necessity of incorporating big data and data driven research and science (DDSR) approaches to study the microbiome concept. In the fourth chapter, I show how the microbiome is a separate concept from metabolome and metagenome, both of which have been argued to emerge at the same moment in history as microbiome and are commonly confused with the microbiome. In the fifth chapter, I explore the development of the microbiome according to different contexts by systematically comparing the variation and change of the language and social context of the microbiome. I conclude, based on a systematic review and analysis of 55,000 full text articles using text analysis and social network analysis methods, the key driver of the microbiome concept was language use by the scientific community and not institutional discourse or funding. Further, I articulate how the microbiome does not adhere to a single definition but encompasses a spectrum of interpretations based on contextual factors like time, space, and region. I published a sample of this research in Isis; showing how the usage and interpretation of the word “human” changed from 2001 to 2010 in a corpus of microbiome articles. I have two more articles based on my dissertation prepared for submission this fall, 1) a systematic review on the microbiome research domain and concept, and 2) hybrid approaches in the analysis of history and knowledge.
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New Directions in the Humanities
James R. Fleming
