And this again sort of brings me back to that opening question of so the usefulness of science of science. I can imagine that, and I've seen this happen, and in my own line of work I help scientists write. So for me it's also true that you can really scoop up these results and start to really try to apply them in ways. What creates more citations? What sort of a group, let's say composition makes the difference and so on. These are things that scientists desperately actually want to know, but from the outside it can very much look so outside of academia or the research world, very much look like well, arcane sorts of knowledge

results

whose usefulness is not immediately apparent. How can you perhaps speak to that double view that people might have of it?

Yeah, the science of science is an interesting field because it really has sort of two different constituent groups who are interested in these kinds of results. And one group of course is the scientists themselves, like scientists want to know how to do better science and of course promote the ideas that they think are very interesting so that they receive the attention of their colleagues and to make progress on these important questions. The other constituency is society and society I think often sort of misses the value of like why do we care about citation counts and publication counts and whether a paper is published in this journal or that journal. Like isn't science just about discovering facts and aren't all facts sort of like, you know, equivalent in terms of being factual? And so there's I think a disconnect between those two constituencies that the practice of the science of science which is often very much about, you'll be a graphic data about the citation network and so on. That's really kind of shop talk for scientists to understand how do we compete with each other to promote our scientific insights and the fields that we think deserve more attention and so on. Whereas the society is much more interested in discoveries themselves and whether or not a new field is going to produce technologies or insights that will be beneficial to society, for instance, for understanding how public health works or disease or making transportation better or something like that. I'm dealing with climate change of course. And so society's interests are much more about the discovery side of the science of science. Whereas the scientists often get sort of lost in the weeds of trying to understand like how can I make my particular science better? They're less interested in sort of the overall sort of systemic level of discovery and more interested in well, I know what discoveries I'm trying to make like how do I make them better. The science of science can speak to both of those groups.