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Institutional measures for norm
enforcement How does the
scientific community make sure that individual members of the community
comply with its norms? Firstly, through training. When scientists are
trained, their instructors teach them not only theory and facts collected by
other scientists, but also research methods which have been designed to
implement scientific norms, in particular by raising their awareness with
concepts such as validity and reliability and with tools such as inferential
statistics. Students are thus socialized into these norms over several years
of training. In some disciplines, such socialization starts during their
undergraduate studies. In others, it only starts at graduate level. In all
cases, it extends up to doctoral, and post-doctoral/habilitation level (the habilitation
has been institutionalized in some countries as a post-doctoral qualification
which gives access to the function of doctoral studies supervisor and which
is a prerequisite to full professorship). An
interesting feature of the scientific community is that it institutionalizes
tests of a sort for its members every time they want to publish results of
their work in a reputable journal through peer-reviewing: a text submitted
for publication is read critically by other members of the community who
assess it and make comments and recommendations, in particular in favour or
against its publication with or without corrections. The
scientific community has also made publication a vital part of the
scientists' career, thus helping enforce the collective and communicative
norms of science. Both the reputation and the chances of scientists to be
promoted at university and research institutions are to a large extent
determined by the number and quality of papers they manage to publish, in
particular in reputable journals. All these
institutional measures combine to create considerable pressure on members of
the community to comply with the norms throughout their career.
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