Reading scientific papers can be a difficult and boring task. The language used is not always clear and simple things turn out to sound overly complicated. But according to Graham Badley reading a scientific paper can also be similar to doing an ethnography. In fact he  (Badley, 2004) writes:

What I propose is that “Constructing a reading of a series of manuscripts—a journal—is like doing ethnography”.

He analyzes a journal through his own ethnographic lens. The reasoning behind it seems very simple yet interesting and fresh:

An academic journal is a cultural artefact. It is made by an ever-changing community of scholars, by a dispersed academic tribe. The tribe’s location is more virtual than actual. The community is represented by its journal, and it is through an ethnographic examination of the data within it that I intend to inquire into that academic culture.

Reading the paper is quite revealing in some instances as Badley points out that the authors tend to avoid writing about themselves and turning phrases around so that they can avoid “I”. Quite interesting is the finding that in his qualitative analysis Graham Badley finds that papers by multiple authors use “we” quite frequently and do not seem to share this avoidance of the writing subject.

Rather then discussing the paper itself I would like to share some of my own opinions on the idea that research on research can be done. By looking at journals as cultural objects we allow our selves to make a cultural analysis of our own practice and ask ourselves: What is it that we do, when we do science?

Badley has an interesting approach which treats scientific activity as cultural doing and he looks at it as if it were something unknown. Looking at it from an “outsiders” perspective opens up new ways to reflect on research and allows us to improve where it is necessary. But Badley offers only one of several possible lenses that we can put on to research on science but reading his paper I think that scientific practice should be an object of study for science (and it is as a search on google scholar for “scientific practice” shows). However Pickering (1992, p.3) describes that:

Oddly enough, while science has always commanded a considerable audience, scholars have traditionally shown little direct interest in scientific practice. Their primary concern has always been with the products of science, especially with its conceptual product, knowledge.

It is important to note that knowledge is a social construct in at least that what we consider to be “knowledgeable” is cultural. To put this a bit differently I would like to take over Badley´s (2004) words, which he takes from Geertz explaining that:

Geertz argues that ethnographic data are “thick” because “what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to”

This might seem rather complex but in fact it means that by studying people we can only imagine or better, reconstruct, what they are doing. As science needs funding at it generally is motivated by an interest it is not random what is studied so that we need to make decisions on what we think we need to know more about. Knowledge is generally what motivates research but don´t we also need to know what research is and how the motives affect the practice or the results?

Metaphorically speaking:

Reading a book might be exploring an interesting story but we should not ignore who wrote the book, what motivated him and how he did it. A cover is saying as much as a page of words sometimes…

References:

Badley, G. (2004). Reading an Academic Journal is Like Doing Ethnography [47 paragraphs].
Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 5(1), Art. 40, http://nbn-
resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0401408.