Edge Induced Cohesion

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Executive Summary

This paper concludes the series by addressing the questions that the preceding papers have deferred: what the field is to be called, how it should present itself to non-specialist audiences, how it should distinguish its work from adjacent enterprises that share some of its concerns but operate by different standards, and how it should examine its own attention patterns with the same scrutiny it applies to other fields. The paper proceeds from the premise that a field whose central business is the rigorous identification of neglected questions cannot afford to be itself a producer of unfounded claims, of unexamined assumptions, or of the same blind spots it documents elsewhere.

The paper develops seven arguments. The first is that the naming question, deferred throughout the series, must be settled deliberately because the name shapes how the field is received by external audiences and what it becomes internally. The second is that public-facing scholarship is intrinsic to the field’s mission rather than incidental to it, and that the public engagement must be conducted with the same methodological seriousness as the field’s scholarly work. The third is that the field must distinguish its rigorous identification of neglect from grievance scholarship, contrarianism, and conspiracy thinking, and that the distinction depends on professional discipline that the field’s institutions must support. The fourth is that internal pluralism — the field’s hospitality to scholars whose underlying commitments differ — is a methodological requirement rather than a political accommodation, since the patterns of neglect cut across the political spectrum and a field that addresses neglect on only one side will misidentify the patterns it studies. The fifth is that the field requires a built-in reflexive program to examine its own attention patterns, with the program operating through established procedures rather than depending on the goodwill of individual scholars. The sixth is that sunset and renewal mechanisms are appropriate to a field whose success in particular domains should sometimes work itself out of a job. The seventh is that the long-term success criteria for the field should be the measurable redistribution of attention in the wider scholarly ecosystem, rather than the growth of the field itself.

The paper concludes with a synthesis of the series and a discussion of the next steps that the founding scholars of the field should consider.

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1. Introduction

The preceding seven papers have specified the field’s conceptual framework, its methodological standards, its academic infrastructure, its funding strategy, its data resources, its workforce, and its engagement with research-governing institutions. The specifications have been substantial and the proposals have been many, but the series has consistently deferred a set of questions that the field’s character ultimately depends on. What is the field called, and what does the name commit it to? How does the field speak to audiences beyond its own scholars? How does the field distinguish its work from enterprises that look similar from outside but operate by different standards? How does the field examine itself with the rigor it applies to others?

The questions are deferred not because they are unimportant but because they cannot be answered until the foundation is in place. A field’s name, its public presentation, its boundaries against adjacent enterprises, and its reflexive commitments depend on what the field actually is, and the preceding papers have specified what the field is to be. The conclusion of the series can now address what the field is to become as it presents itself to the wider world.

The argument of this paper is that the reflexive commitments are not optional additions to the field’s substantive work; they are constitutive of it. A field whose central business is the rigorous identification of neglected questions cannot afford to be itself a producer of unfounded claims, of unexamined assumptions, or of the same blind spots it documents elsewhere. The reflexive commitments operate as professional discipline, as institutional design, and as cultural maintenance. They are demanding to sustain, but the field’s credibility depends on them, and the credibility is the foundation on which everything else the series has proposed rests.

The paper proceeds through the seven questions identified above, addresses the synthesis of the series as a whole, and concludes with the practical next steps that the field’s founding scholars should consider.

2. The Naming Question

The working term used throughout this series has been neglect studies, with the acknowledgment in Paper 1 that the term is provisional and that the field’s eventual name remains an open question. The question must now be addressed.

Several candidate names have been used in adjacent literatures or could be proposed for the field. Each carries implications, and the choice among them shapes both how the field is received externally and what it becomes internally.

Agnotology, as developed by Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, has the advantages of an established intellectual tradition, a substantial literature, and a recognizable name in the relevant scholarly circles. The case for adopting the term and treating the proposed field as an expansion of agnotology is that the conceptual core is shared, that the methodological tools overlap substantially, and that the broader recognition of agnotology in the science studies community provides an entry point that a wholly new name would lack. The case against is that agnotology’s center of gravity has settled firmly on strategic ignorance — the manufactured doubt produced by interested actors — while the larger and arguably more consequential category of passive neglect has received much less attention. The field’s expansion of the agnotology agenda may sit uncomfortably within the existing literature, and the term may signal to external audiences a different set of commitments than the field actually maintains.

Undone-science studies, drawing on the Hess and Frickel tradition, has the advantages of a methodologically sophisticated literature, an explicit attention to civil-society challenges to research-priority decisions, and a name that captures one of the field’s central concerns. The case against is that the term has been associated primarily with environmental and public-health contexts and with cases where organized constituencies exist to identify the gap, while the field’s scope extends well beyond these. The term may also signal an activist orientation that the field’s methodological standards do not support, and the field would need to expand both the scope and the disposition that the term implies.

Attention studies has the advantage of plain English and the disadvantage of being already used for several different scholarly enterprises in cognitive science, media studies, and elsewhere. The collision of meanings would generate persistent confusion, and the name probably should be rejected on those grounds alone.

Epistemic gap analysis has the advantage of methodological transparency — it announces what the field does in terms that scholars from other disciplines can readily understand — and the disadvantage of clinical neutrality that may not serve the field’s public engagement. The name reads as a technical specialty rather than as a field with its own intellectual identity, and the field’s broader ambitions may be poorly served by it.

Neglect studies, the working term, has the advantages of plain English, of capturing what the field does in terms that non-specialists can immediately understand, and of not colliding with established uses in other contexts. The disadvantages are that the term sounds less methodologically sophisticated than the field aspires to be, that it carries connotations of complaint or grievance that the field must explicitly distance itself from, and that it does not connect the field to the established traditions on which it draws.

The recommendation is that neglect studies should be retained as the field’s working name, with the explicit understanding that the name’s plainness is a virtue rather than a limitation. The field’s methodological sophistication should be demonstrated through the work rather than signaled by the name, and the plainness of the name has the practical advantage of accessibility to the public and policy audiences whose engagement the field requires. The name’s potential connotations of grievance must be addressed through the field’s professional discipline rather than avoided through more technical naming. The connection to established traditions can be maintained through citation practice, through institutional partnerships, and through the work’s substantive engagement with the literatures on which it draws.

The recommendation is offered with the recognition that other choices are defensible and that the field’s founding scholars may settle on a different name. What matters more than the specific choice is that the choice be made deliberately, with attention to its implications, and that the choice be sustained consistently across the field’s outputs once made. A field that drifts among multiple names in its early years confuses external audiences and disadvantages itself in the consolidation that establishes a field’s identity.

3. Public-Facing Scholarship

The field’s public engagement is intrinsic to its mission rather than incidental to it. The argument has three components.

The first is that the field’s findings have public implications. To say that the research system has misallocated attention in particular ways is to say something with consequences for how public resources are spent, for what questions are addressed in policies that affect people’s lives, and for what voices are heard in the production of knowledge that shapes public understanding. The implications are not always obvious or immediate, but they are real, and the public has legitimate interests in the field’s findings.

The second is that the public is itself a constituency for some of the field’s most important work. The constituency-less-questions category in the Paper 1 taxonomy points to cases where the absent parties are members of the public whose concerns have not been adequately represented in scholarly research. The field’s engagement with these cases requires engagement with the publics whose interests are involved, both to inform the public about the patterns of neglect that affect them and to learn from the public about the questions that scholarly research has failed to address.

The third is that the public is the ultimate source of the legitimacy on which the research system depends. The funding that supports research, the institutional autonomy that universities enjoy, the standing of scholarly expertise in policy decisions: all of these depend on public support that can be withdrawn if the public concludes that the research system has failed to serve its interests. A field that examines the patterns of attention in scholarly inquiry has a specific contribution to make to the public’s understanding of the research system, and the contribution serves both the public’s interests and the research system’s long-term legitimacy.

The public-facing scholarship that the field requires must be conducted with the same methodological seriousness as the field’s scholarly work. The standards include accuracy in the representation of findings, explicit acknowledgment of the limitations and uncertainties that the underlying work carries, attention to the framing of findings in ways that the public can use, and avoidance of the sensationalism that exaggerates the field’s claims for the sake of attention.

The specific forms of public engagement the field should pursue include several. The dashboard introduced in Paper 5 provides a public-facing data resource that the public can use to explore the patterns of attention in research areas of interest. The journalism partnerships that translate the field’s findings into accessible forms can amplify the field’s reach beyond what the field’s own scholars can accomplish. The participation of the field’s scholars in broader public conversations about science and research policy provides opportunities to bring the field’s perspective to discussions that would otherwise proceed without it. The educational materials that introduce the field’s questions to students and general audiences support the broader public literacy on which the field’s longer-term standing depends.

The risks of public engagement are familiar from many scholarly fields and require explicit attention. The first risk is the simplification of findings in ways that misrepresent the underlying work. The risk is sometimes unavoidable in genuinely public-facing communication, but it must be managed by careful attention to how findings are framed, by explicit acknowledgment of the simplifications when they occur, and by the availability of fuller treatments for audiences who want to engage with the work in more depth. The second risk is the misuse of findings by actors with their own agendas. The risk cannot be eliminated, but it can be reduced by the field’s own clarity about what its findings support and do not support, and it can be managed by the field’s willingness to correct misuses when they occur. The third risk is the distortion of the field’s research agenda by the demands of public attention, with the field’s scholars finding themselves drawn toward the topics that generate public interest at the expense of less visible but equally important work. The corrective is the maintenance of the field’s professional standards independently of public attention patterns, with the understanding that not all of the field’s important work will receive public attention and that the field’s value is not measured by its visibility alone.

4. Distinguishing the Field from Adjacent Enterprises

The field must distinguish its work from adjacent enterprises that share some of its concerns but operate by different standards. The distinction is essential to the field’s credibility and to its capacity to engage productively with the broader research-policy environment.

Three adjacent enterprises deserve specific treatment.

4.1 Grievance Scholarship

Some scholarship that identifies cases of neglect operates as a vehicle for advancing the substantive interests of its authors rather than as a methodologically careful identification of patterns in the research system. The scholarship may be sincere — the authors may genuinely believe that the cases they identify are neglected — but the methodological standards are typically lower than the field requires, and the conclusions tend to align predictably with the authors’ substantive commitments rather than emerging from independent analysis.

The distinction between grievance scholarship and rigorous identification of neglect depends on the methodological standards developed in Paper 2 and on the professional norms developed across the series. The field’s outputs should be evaluated against the tiered evidence standard, with the higher tiers requiring triangulation across methods and explicit consideration of the alternative explanations for apparent neglect. The field’s professional culture should reward methodologically careful work that produces conclusions the author would not have predicted in advance, and should discount work whose conclusions track the author’s prior commitments without independent evidentiary support.

The field’s institutional structures must be designed to enforce the distinction. The journal’s editorial standards must require submissions to meet the methodological criteria appropriate to the tier claimed, with editors and reviewers trained to recognize the difference between rigorous identification of neglect and substantive advocacy in methodological clothing. The registry’s evidence-tier system must be applied consistently, with entries that do not meet the documentation requirements either declined or accepted only at the exploratory tier with explicit labeling. The professional association’s standards must require members to maintain the methodological practices that distinguish the field’s work from grievance scholarship.

The enforcement is delicate because the boundary is not always clear and because the field’s scholars will sometimes have substantive commitments that bear on the questions they study. The distinction is not that the field’s scholars must lack commitments; it is that the work must meet the methodological standards regardless of the commitments. A scholar who has substantive interest in a particular case of neglect can still produce rigorous work on that case, provided the work is conducted by methods that would be persuasive to scholars who do not share the interest and that explicitly considers the alternative explanations for the apparent neglect. The professional discipline is to meet that standard consistently, even when the substantive commitments make it tempting to relax.

4.2 Contrarianism

A second adjacent enterprise that the field must distinguish itself from is contrarianism — the disposition to oppose established positions because they are established rather than because the evidence supports the opposition. Contrarianism shares with neglect studies an interest in questions that established communities have not addressed, but the contrarian’s motivation is the rejection of established authority rather than the methodologically careful identification of patterns in attention.

The distinction matters because the field’s work can superficially resemble contrarianism. A scholar who identifies an area as neglected is implicitly questioning the priorities of the established research community in that area, and the questioning can be misread as contrarian opposition. The misreading damages the field’s credibility with the established communities whose cooperation it requires, and the field must accordingly distinguish itself from contrarianism explicitly.

The distinction depends on the methodological standards and on the field’s professional culture. The field’s work proceeds from analysis to conclusions, with the analysis conducted by methods that the relevant scholarly communities recognize as appropriate. The contrarian proceeds from a disposition to oppose established positions, with the analysis serving to justify a conclusion that the disposition predetermined. The two can produce findings that look similar at a glance, but the methodological structure that produces them is different, and the field’s outputs must make the methodological structure explicit.

The field’s engagement with established communities should also include explicit acknowledgment of what those communities have done well. A neglect-studies analysis that identifies a particular case of misallocation in a discipline is more credible when it situates the case against an accurate understanding of the discipline’s achievements and constraints than when it presents the case as evidence of the discipline’s general failure. The framing is not strategic accommodation; it is methodologically appropriate, since the patterns of attention always reflect both genuine accomplishments and the structural distortions that the field identifies, and accurate analysis must capture both.

4.3 Conspiracy Thinking

The third adjacent enterprise the field must distinguish itself from is conspiracy thinking — the tendency to attribute patterns in the research system to the deliberate coordination of interested actors who suppress particular questions for their own purposes. Conspiracy thinking shares with neglect studies an interest in the mechanisms by which attention is allocated, but the structure of explanation differs in important ways.

The field’s account of the mechanisms of neglect, developed across the preceding papers, emphasizes structural factors: funding incentives, prestige hierarchies, methodological habits, disciplinary boundaries, and historical contingencies. The mechanisms operate without anyone necessarily intending the patterns they produce, and the corrective interventions accordingly operate on the structures rather than on the supposed agents of suppression. The conspiracy account, by contrast, emphasizes intentional coordination: identified actors who deliberately suppress particular questions for purposes the conspiracy theorist can articulate.

The two accounts can sometimes apply to the same cases, and the agnotology literature has documented cases in which industrial actors have deliberately suppressed research findings that threatened their commercial interests. The field’s work should not deny that such cases exist; the literature on tobacco, on climate, and on other documented cases of strategic ignorance is solid, and the field’s scholars should engage with it on its merits. The distinction is that the field’s analytical default should be structural explanation, with intentional coordination introduced as an explanation only when the evidence specifically supports it. The default reflects both the structural realities of the research system, in which most patterns are produced by uncoordinated incentive structures rather than by deliberate suppression, and the methodological discipline that the field’s credibility requires.

The risk of conspiracy thinking is particularly acute for the field because the work attracts audiences who are predisposed toward conspiratorial interpretations. The audiences include scholars whose own work has been received poorly and who are inclined to attribute the reception to deliberate suppression rather than to methodological or substantive limitations of the work; advocacy organizations whose interests are served by framing research-policy decisions as the products of deliberate manipulation; and members of the public whose distrust of scientific institutions makes conspiratorial explanations attractive. The field’s engagement with these audiences must include the patient maintenance of the structural-explanation default and the explicit rejection of conspiratorial interpretations that the evidence does not support.

5. Internal Pluralism

The field’s hospitality to scholars whose underlying commitments differ is a methodological requirement rather than a political accommodation. The argument has three components.

The first is that the patterns of neglect cut across the political spectrum. Some neglected questions bear on concerns that are typically associated with the political left — health disparities, environmental injustice, the underrepresentation of women’s health questions in clinical research. Other neglected questions bear on concerns typically associated with the political right — the effects of family structure on child outcomes, the predictive validity of certain psychological constructs, the long-term consequences of particular policy interventions. Yet other questions cut across the political spectrum or are not naturally located on it at all — many questions in foundational science, in the humanities, and in the history of knowledge. A field that addresses only the questions associated with one political position will miss the patterns that cross the spectrum, and the partial coverage will reduce the field to a vehicle for advocacy rather than a genuine scholarly enterprise.

The second is that the field’s empirical credibility depends on demonstrating that its identifications of neglect are not driven by the political commitments of its scholars. A field whose findings consistently align with the commitments of one political position will be received as ideological rather than scholarly, and the reception will be appropriate to the pattern. The credibility requires the field to include scholars with diverse commitments, to evaluate work by methodological standards rather than by political affinity, and to recognize cases of neglect across the political spectrum on the same terms.

The third is that the methodological maturity the field requires is supported by intellectual diversity. A field whose scholars share substantive commitments tends to develop blind spots that scholars with different commitments would have noticed. The diversity is not a substitute for methodological rigor — diverse scholars can still produce poor work — but it is a condition for the rigor to operate effectively, since the methodological scrutiny depends on perspectives that can identify weaknesses that the scholars themselves do not see.

The implications for the field’s institutional structures are several. The editorial board of the flagship journal should include scholars with diverse commitments, with the diversity attended to deliberately at the founding rather than assumed to emerge naturally. The recruitment of doctoral students and early-career scholars should not select implicitly for particular commitments, and the field’s professional culture should welcome scholars across the spectrum on the same terms. The engagement with research-governing institutions should be conducted in ways that do not privilege the concerns of any particular political position. The reflexive program discussed below should specifically examine whether the field’s attention patterns show the kinds of political asymmetries that would compromise the field’s credibility.

The implications are demanding, and the field will face pressure against them. The pressure will come from scholars whose own commitments make particular cases of neglect more visible to them than others, from audiences who want the field to support their substantive positions, and from the broader political environment in which scholarly work increasingly carries political valence. Resisting the pressure is among the most important professional disciplines the field must develop, and the institutional design must explicitly support the resistance.

6. The Reflexive Program

The field requires a built-in reflexive program to examine its own attention patterns. The program operates through established procedures rather than depending on the goodwill of individual scholars, and the procedures should be specified in the field’s foundational documents rather than developed in response to subsequent controversies.

The reflexive program has several specific components.

The first is the periodic audit of the field’s own research portfolio. The audits should be conducted on a defined schedule — perhaps every five years — by scholars not directly involved in the work being audited, and the audits should examine what the field has and has not addressed during the period under review. The findings should be published in the field’s outlets and should inform the discussions of the field’s priorities going forward. The audits should specifically attend to potential blind spots: areas the field would be expected to address but has not, perspectives the field has not adequately included, and patterns in the field’s outputs that suggest implicit priorities the field’s scholars have not endorsed explicitly.

The second is the explicit attention to neglect across the political spectrum. The discussion in section 5 above identified the methodological requirement, and the reflexive program should include the procedural mechanisms that maintain the requirement in practice. The audit findings should report on the political distribution of the cases the field has addressed; the editorial decisions should be reviewed periodically to ensure that they do not show patterns of preference for particular kinds of cases; and the recruitment and retention of scholars should be examined to ensure that the field’s professional community remains diverse in the commitments its members bring.

The third is the assessment of the field’s engagement relationships and their effects on the field’s research portfolio. The engagement with research-governing institutions, discussed in Paper 7, creates pressures that can shift the field’s emphases in ways the field’s scholars would not endorse on reflection. The reflexive program should examine whether the engagement has produced such shifts, whether the engagement partners’ priorities are appropriately represented in the field’s work, and whether the structural commitments that protect the field’s analytical independence are being maintained in practice. The assessment should be conducted by scholars who are not themselves heavily involved in the engagement relationships, and the findings should be published in the field’s outlets.

The fourth is the periodic review of the field’s methodological standards and the tiered evidence system. The standards introduced in Paper 2 will require revision as the field’s experience accumulates, and the revision should be conducted through deliberate processes rather than through informal drift. The review should examine whether the standards have been applied consistently across the field’s outputs, whether the tiered system has functioned as intended, and whether the methodological developments in adjacent fields require the field’s standards to be updated. The review should be conducted by the field’s professional community through transparent procedures, and the revised standards should be documented explicitly.

The fifth is the examination of the field’s own internal patterns of attention. A field that studies which questions are addressed and which are neglected in other research areas must apply the same scrutiny to its own work. The examination should identify the substantive areas, methodological approaches, and types of cases that the field has emphasized and those it has not, and should examine whether the patterns reflect deliberate priorities or implicit ones that the field’s scholars would not endorse on reflection. The examination should be conducted with the same methodological seriousness the field applies to other fields, and the findings should inform the field’s priorities going forward.

The reflexive program is uncomfortable in practice because it requires the field’s scholars to apply scrutiny to their own work with the same rigor they apply to others. The discomfort is the point: a field whose central business is the rigorous identification of neglected questions cannot afford to be itself a producer of unfounded claims, of unexamined assumptions, or of the same blind spots it documents elsewhere. The reflexive commitments must be sustained as professional discipline, and the institutional structures must be designed to support the discipline even when sustaining it is uncomfortable.

7. Sunset and Renewal

A healthy neglect-studies enterprise should sometimes work itself out of a job in particular domains. The argument is that the field’s success in specific cases consists precisely in the redistribution of attention that the field has identified as warranted. When a previously neglected area develops its own research community, institutional infrastructure, and sustained attention, the field’s specific work on that area has succeeded, and the work itself becomes less necessary even as it leaves behind a transformed research landscape.

The principle has implications for how the field organizes its specific research programs. A center, project, or fellowship dedicated to a particular case of neglect should be conceived with explicit consideration of what the success conditions would look like and what the appropriate response to success would be. The success conditions should be specified before the work begins, the indicators that the conditions are being met should be tracked during the work, and the response to success should include the redirection of the resources to other neglected cases rather than the indefinite continuation of the specific program.

The principle is uncomfortable institutionally because institutional structures tend to perpetuate themselves once established. A center has staff whose livelihoods depend on the center’s continuation, a project has scholars whose careers are invested in the project’s ongoing work, and the natural pressures favor the institutional persistence even when the original justification has weakened. The field’s institutional design must include explicit mechanisms for resisting these pressures, with sunset clauses in specific programs, with periodic external reviews that consider whether continuation is warranted, and with cultural norms that celebrate the cases in which the field’s specific work has succeeded and is no longer needed.

The corresponding principle is renewal. The cases of neglect are not static; new cases emerge as research areas develop, as new methodologies become available, as new constituencies organize, and as the broader research system changes. The field’s institutional structures should include explicit mechanisms for identifying emerging cases and for redirecting attention toward them, with the renewal proceeding alongside the sunset of specific programs whose work has succeeded.

The sunset-and-renewal principle applies to the field as a whole as well as to its specific programs. If the field’s broader work succeeds — if the patterns of attention in the research system become more responsive to the structural distortions the field has identified, if the institutional mechanisms for identifying and addressing neglect become routine features of the research system, if the methodological and conceptual contributions the field has made become widely diffused — then the field’s specific institutional structures may become less necessary even as the broader work continues. The possibility should not be feared. A field whose mission is the redistribution of attention should welcome the success that makes its specific work less necessary, even as it continues to address the new cases that emerge as the research landscape evolves.

The recognition does not require the field to plan its own dissolution. The patterns of neglect are persistent features of scholarly inquiry, and the field’s work will remain necessary for as long as scholarly inquiry continues to allocate attention in the structurally distorted ways that the preceding papers have documented. The recognition is rather that the field’s success is measured not by its own growth and persistence but by the changes in the broader research system that the field’s work has helped to produce. The orientation toward external success rather than internal preservation is among the most important cultural commitments the field must maintain.

8. Long-Term Success Criteria

The discussion of sunset and renewal points toward the question of how the field’s long-term success should be measured. The answer is that the measure should be the redistribution of attention in the wider scholarly ecosystem, not the growth of the field itself.

The specific indicators of success include several. The first is the reduction in patterns of structural neglect that the field has documented. The patterns identified in particular cases should diminish over time if the field’s interventions have been effective, and the diminution should be measurable through the same bibliometric and analytical tools that identified the original patterns. The measurement requires the long-term data infrastructure discussed in Paper 5 and the sustained analytical work that the workforce of Paper 6 will conduct.

The second is the incorporation of the field’s methods and concepts into the routine practice of research-governing institutions. The funding agencies that adopt portfolio review as a regular practice, the learned societies that commission stocktaking reviews of their own disciplines, the universities that revise their tenure criteria to recognize the kinds of contributions the field’s scholars make, and the international organizations that incorporate attention to neglect into their standard practices all represent forms of success that go beyond the field’s own work. The success consists in the field’s contributions becoming part of how the research system works rather than remaining specific to the field’s own activities.

The third is the broader cultural shift in how the research system understands itself. The recognition that attention is allocated rather than distributed, that the allocation mechanisms produce structural distortions, and that the distortions are appropriate subjects of scholarly study and corrective intervention all represent cultural shifts that the field’s work can contribute to even when the contributions cannot be traced to specific outputs. The cultural shift is harder to measure than the specific indicators above, but it is the deepest form of success the field can achieve, and the indicators of it can be tracked through the changing terms in which the research system discusses its own priorities.

The success criteria are demanding, and they extend on timelines that exceed any individual scholar’s career. The field’s founding scholars will not see the full measure of the success they have contributed to, and the patience required to sustain work whose results extend across generations is among the cultural commitments the field must maintain. The patience is not resignation; it is the recognition that the work the field undertakes is of a scale that requires sustained effort over long periods, and that the contributions of any individual scholar or any individual cohort are valuable contributions to a larger project rather than self-contained achievements.

The implication for the field’s evaluation of its own progress is that the standard measures of scholarly success — citations, publications, grants, prestige — are partial indicators rather than ultimate measures. The standard measures matter for the practical reasons that any field’s standing depends on them, and the field must perform adequately by these measures to maintain the institutional infrastructure that supports its work. But the standard measures do not capture the field’s deepest contributions, and the field’s professional culture should keep the broader success criteria in view rather than allowing the standard measures to become ends in themselves.

9. Synthesis of the Series

The preface to this series argued that the distribution of scholarly attention bears a complicated and often weak relationship to the distribution of scholarly importance, and that the institutional and intellectual scaffolding needed to study this phenomenon systematically has not yet been built. The seven papers that followed have specified what the scaffolding would look like: the conceptual framework that defines what the field studies, the methodological standards that distinguish rigorous identification of neglect from impressionistic claims, the academic infrastructure that hosts the work, the funding strategy that sustains it, the data resources that enable it, the workforce that conducts it, and the engagement with research-governing institutions through which the work reaches the bodies that can act on it.

This final paper has addressed the commitments that hold the whole structure together: the field’s name and public identity, its distinctions from adjacent enterprises that operate by different standards, its internal pluralism, its reflexive examination of its own attention patterns, its orientation toward eventual success rather than indefinite self-perpetuation, and its broader success criteria measured by changes in the wider research system rather than by the field’s own growth.

The series has consistently emphasized the interdependencies among its elements. The methodological standards cannot be applied without the institutional infrastructure that hosts them; the institutional infrastructure cannot be sustained without the funding strategy that supports it; the funding strategy cannot be implemented without the workforce that engages with the funding partners; the engagement with funding partners cannot be conducted without the analytical independence that the reflexive commitments protect. The field cannot be built piecemeal, with elements added as resources allow and the others deferred indefinitely. The elements support each other, and the coherent building of the whole requires attention to all of them from the outset, even when their development proceeds on different timelines.

The series has also emphasized the long timelines on which the field’s work proceeds. The founding centers can be established within a few years; the journal can be launched within five; the workforce that gives the field a sustained scholarly community emerges over a decade; the broader changes in the research system that constitute the field’s deepest success extend across generations. The patience required to sustain the work over these timelines is among the cultural commitments the founding scholars must maintain, and the institutional structures must be designed to support the patience even when the temptations toward shorter-horizon thinking are persistent.

The series has been explicit about the risks the field faces. The risk of becoming a vehicle for grievance scholarship, of being captured by the institutions it engages with, of developing the same blind spots it documents elsewhere, of growing too quickly to maintain its standards or too slowly to sustain its infrastructure, of being co-opted by political actors whose purposes the field’s analytical commitments do not support — all of these have been identified, and the structural commitments that protect against them have been specified. The protections are not guarantees; they are professional disciplines that the field’s scholars must maintain through ongoing effort, and the maintenance is among the most important professional commitments the field requires.

The series has been deliberate in its argumentative structure, with each paper building on the preceding ones and the conclusions of each paper feeding into the next. The structure reflects the actual interdependencies of the field’s institutional infrastructure rather than a rhetorical convenience. The founding scholars who read the series should expect to encounter the same interdependencies in practice, and the founding work should be planned with the recognition that the elements must be developed in coordination rather than in sequence.

10. Next Steps

The series has been a design document rather than an implementation plan, and the conclusion of the series should specify the next steps that the founding scholars should consider.

The first step is the convening of a founding committee. The committee should include senior scholars from the disciplines on which the field draws — agnotology, metascience, science and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, library and information science, priority-setting research, and the research-waste literature — together with representatives from the constituencies the field will serve: funding agencies that have expressed interest in the field’s work, foundations whose missions align with the field, and practitioners who can speak to the public’s interests in the field’s outputs. The committee’s task should be to review the series, to refine the proposals in light of the committee’s collective expertise, and to develop the specific implementation plans that the proposals require.

The second step is the identification of the institutions that will host the founding centers. The criteria for selection were discussed in Paper 3, and the committee should apply the criteria to identify the candidate institutions whose senior scholars, institutional environments, and funding arrangements make them the most plausible hosts. The selection should be deliberate rather than first-come, and the institutions selected should be expected to commit to the long-term institutional support that the founding centers will require.

The third step is the establishment of the funding partnerships that will support the founding work. The strategy outlined in Paper 4 emphasized philanthropic funding as the likely first mover, and the committee should engage with the foundations whose missions align with the field to develop the specific funding proposals that the founding work requires. The engagement should be conducted with attention to the diversification that the funding strategy emphasized, with multiple funders cultivated from the outset rather than reliance on any single funder for the early support.

The fourth step is the launch of the founding centers, with the institutional infrastructure, the funding, and the senior scholarly leadership in place. The launches should be coordinated across the centers rather than proceeding independently, with explicit attention to the complementarity among the centers and to the cross-institutional connections that will support the field’s broader community.

The fifth step is the development of the flagship journal, the registry, and the other elements of the publication infrastructure that Paper 3 specified. The development should proceed in coordination with the founding centers, with the editorial leadership drawn from the centers’ senior scholars and the operational support hosted by one of the centers.

The sixth step is the longer-term work that the preceding papers have specified: the doctoral training, the workforce development, the data infrastructure, the engagement relationships, and the reflexive program. The work proceeds on the timelines that the relevant papers identified, with the founding committee maintaining oversight of the broader strategy during the period before the field’s professional association can assume the governance functions.

The steps are demanding, and the founding scholars who undertake them are committing to long-term work whose results extend beyond their own careers. The commitment is justified, in this paper’s view, by the contributions the field can make to the broader research enterprise and to the public interests that the research enterprise serves. The justification is a matter for the founding scholars to assess for themselves, and the series has been offered as a contribution to that assessment rather than as a settled brief.

The preface to this series concluded with an invitation: that readers who find the case persuasive engage with the subsequent papers, and that readers who find it unpersuasive articulate the grounds of their disagreement. The conclusion of the series renews the invitation. The field that the series has proposed will be built only if scholars who find the case persuasive undertake the work, and the work will be more rigorous if it proceeds in conversation with scholars whose perspectives differ from the founders’. The conversation should continue, and the series should be understood as one contribution to it rather than as the last word.

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Notes

[^1]: The naming question for emerging interdisciplinary fields has been examined in several contexts; the discussion in Klein (1990) of how field names shape disciplinary identities provides useful background, and the case studies in Frodeman, Klein, and Pacheco (2017) include several relevant examples.

[^2]: The literature on public engagement in science is substantial; the standards-of-practice work developed by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement in the U.K. and parallel bodies elsewhere provides operational guidance, and the scholarly literature on the role of public engagement in research is reviewed in Stilgoe, Lock, and Wilsdon (2014).

[^3]: The distinction between rigorous identification of neglect and grievance scholarship draws on the broader literature on scholarly standards in fields with applied dimensions; Lamont (2009), cited in Paper 2, addresses adjacent questions in the context of peer review.

[^4]: The literature on contrarianism in scholarly contexts is partial but includes useful treatments in the philosophy of science; the discussion in Boudry, Blancke, and Pigliucci (2015) of the distinction between productive heterodoxy and unproductive contrarianism provides relevant analysis.

[^5]: The agnotology literature, cited extensively in earlier papers, is the primary scholarly source for the analysis of strategic ignorance; Proctor and Schiebinger (2008) and the case studies in Proctor (2011) and Oreskes and Conway (2010) provide the foundational material.

[^6]: The reflexivity literature in science studies is large and includes both methodological treatments and substantive applications; Woolgar (1988) provides a foundational statement, and the subsequent literature has developed the application of reflexive methods in many directions.

[^7]: The literature on the dissolution and renewal of research programs is partly historical and partly philosophical; Laudan (1977), cited in Paper 1, addresses the philosophical questions, and the historical literature on specific cases provides the empirical material.

[^8]: The long-term assessment of scholarly fields is discussed in the literature on the sociology of knowledge; the work of Whitley (2000) on the intellectual and social organization of the sciences provides useful conceptual resources, and the more recent literature on field formation and dissolution extends the analysis.

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References

Boudry, M., Blancke, S., & Pigliucci, M. (2015). What makes weird beliefs thrive? The epidemiology of pseudoscience. Philosophical Psychology, 28(8), 1177–1198.

Frodeman, R., Klein, J. T., & Pacheco, R. C. S. (Eds.). (2017). The Oxford handbook of interdisciplinarity (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Klein, J. T. (1990). Interdisciplinarity: History, theory, and practice. Wayne State University Press.

Lamont, M. (2009). How professors think: Inside the curious world of academic judgment. Harvard University Press.

Laudan, L. (1977). Progress and its problems: Toward a theory of scientific growth. University of California Press.

Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2010). Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. Bloomsbury Press.

Proctor, R. N. (2011). Golden holocaust: Origins of the cigarette catastrophe and the case for abolition. University of California Press.

Proctor, R. N., & Schiebinger, L. (Eds.). (2008). Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Stanford University Press.

Stilgoe, J., Lock, S. J., & Wilsdon, J. (2014). Why should we promote public engagement with science? Public Understanding of Science, 23(1), 4–15.

Whitley, R. (2000). The intellectual and social organization of the sciences (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Woolgar, S. (Ed.). (1988). Knowledge and reflexivity: New frontiers in the sociology of knowledge. Sage.

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The series concludes here. The founding scholars who take up the work that the series has proposed will determine whether the field that has been described becomes a reality, and the answer to that question lies in their hands rather than in any further argumentative effort the series could provide.