The DOI matches its Crossref record; 100 of the 100 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Here and Everywhere: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
Open accessAbstract
The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is one of the profession’s most marginal specialties, yet its objects of inquiry, its modes of inquiry, and certain of its findings have very substantial bearing upon the nature and scope of the sociological enterprise in general. While traditional sociology of knowledge asked how, and to what extent, “social factors” might influence the products of the mind, SSK sought to show that knowledge was constitutively social, and in so doing, it raised fundamental questions about taken-for-granted divisions between “social versus cognitive, or natural, factors.” This piece traces the historical development of the sociology of scientific knowledge and its relations with sociology and cultural inquiry as a whole. It identifies dominant “localist” sensibilities in SSK and the consequent problem it now confronts of how scientific knowledge travels. Finally, it describes several strands of criticism of SSK that have emerged from among its own practitioners, noting the ways in which some criticisms can be seen as a revival of old aspirations toward privileged meta-languages.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The social construction of reality : a treatise in the sociology of knowledge
Simpson, G., Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1967) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.2307/2091739 · Cited by 16,462
Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society
Bijker, W. E., & Latour, B. (1988) · Technology and Culture · doi:10.2307/3105094 · Cited by 10,767
(1994) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.31-4888 · Cited by 9,294
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Bohm, D., & Kuhn, T. S. (1964) · The Philosophical Quarterly · doi:10.2307/2217783 · Cited by 9,130
(1987) · Cited by 8,955
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
Reid, L. A., & Polanyi, M. (1959) · British Journal of Educational Studies · doi:10.2307/3119338 · Cited by 7,538
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
McNeil, M., & Haraway, D. J. (1992) · Feminist Review · doi:10.2307/1395245 · Cited by 6,794
The Structure of Social Action
Rauber, E. L., & Parsons, T. (1938) · Southern Economic Journal · doi:10.2307/1052455 · Cited by 3,934
The science question in feminism
Waters, K. (1987) · Women's Studies International Forum · doi:10.1016/0277-5395(87)90077-x · Cited by 3,804
Power, Action and Belief. A New Sociology of Knowledge?
Law, J. R., Fyfe, G., Callon, M., Latour, B., Rayner, S. G., & Douglas, M. (1986) · Routledge eBooks · Cited by 3,524
Cited by
What is strategic management, really? Inductive derivation of a consensus definition of the field
Nag, R., Hambrick, D. C., & Chen, M. (2007) · Strategic Management Journal · doi:10.1002/smj.615 · Cited by 836
MacRoberts, M. H., & MacRoberts, B. R. (1996) · Scientometrics · doi:10.1007/bf02129604 · Cited by 503
Local Knowledge in the Environment–Development Discourse: From dichotomies to situated knowledges
Nygren, A. (1999) · Critique of Anthropology · doi:10.1177/0308275x9901900304 · Cited by 317
Resnik, D. B., & Hosseini, M. (2025) · AI and Ethics · doi:10.1007/s43681-024-00493-8 · Cited by 228
“Sociologists such as Merton [147] and Shapin [208], tend to view ethical norms as generalizations that accurately describe the practice of science, while philosophers, such as Kitcher [125] and Haack [89], conceive of these norms as prescriptive standards that scientists ought to follow.”
The sociology of scientific validity: How professional networks shape judgement in peer review
Teplitskiy, M., Acuna, D., Elamrani-Raoult, A., Körding, K., & Evans, J. (2018) · Research Policy · doi:10.1016/j.respol.2018.06.014 · Cited by 113
Metadata
- Authors
- Shapin, S.
- Venue
- Annual Review of Sociology
- Publisher
- Annual Reviews
- Published
- 1995-08
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 289-321
- ISSN
- 0360-0572 (ISSN-L)
- 1545-2115
- OpenAlex
- W2159794963
- Cited by
- 482
- References
- 100
- FWCI
- 34.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Here and Everywhere: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1146/annurev.so.21.080195.001445
- The paper
- Shapin, S. (1995). Here and Everywhere: Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. Annual Review of Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.21.080195.001445
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
