Signing Together. Contribution and Evaluation in Science

Scientific activity is crossed with a fundamental tension between organizational forms of collaborative work and evaluation policies that consecrate individual geniuses. This tension regularly restarts the debates about the authorship of scientific articles and, since the 1950s, has been feeding the production of new tools intended to recompose the modes of attribution of scientific productions when multiple actors are involved and when their hierarchization is fiercely discussed.

By focusing on life sciences, medical research and particles physics, David Pontille analyzes the concomitant changes in the modes of scientific contribution and in both the material and institutionalized forms of the authorship of the articles. Examining the expression of the scientific authority, the principles of distribution of action and decision-making in work organizations, he shows how significantly these displacements modify the driving forces of elaboration of subjectivity at work in science.

The book engages in wide-ranging reflection likely to support another policy for the evaluation of scientific work in all the fields of research.

2016 – Economica

Language: French