Reconciling conflicting themes of traditionality and innovation: an application of research networks using author affili
- PDF / 1,104,759 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 24 Downloads / 154 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Reconciling conflicting themes of traditionality and innovation: an application of research networks using author affiliation Debdatta Saha1 · T. M. Vasuprada1 Received: 3 July 2020 / Accepted: 16 September 2020 © Institute of Korean Medicine, Kyung Hee University 2020
Abstract Innovation takes different forms: varying from path-breaking discoveries to adaptive changes that survive external shifts in the environment. Our paper investigates the nature and process of innovation in the traditional knowledge system of Ayurveda by tracing the footprints that innovation leaves in the academic research network of published papers from the PubMed database. Traditional knowledge systems defy the application of standard measures of innovation such as patents and patent citations. However, the continuity in content of these knowledge systems, which are studied using modern publication standards prescribed by academic journals, indicate a kind of adaptive innovation that we track using an author-affiliation based measure of homophily. Our investigation of this measure and its relationship with currently accepted standards of journal quality clearly shows how systems of knowledge can continue in an unbroken tradition without becoming extinct. Rather than no innovation, traditional knowledge systems evolve by adapting to modern standards of knowledge dissemination without significant alteration in their content. Keywords Traditional medicine · Ayurveda · Academic research networks · Innovative potential · Affiliation-based homophily · Q measure of assortative mixing
Introduction One important platform for sharing knowledge, be it results of cutting-edge research or establishing old truths in a modern context, is journal publications (Thyer 2008; Edwards 2015; Sandström and van den Besselaar 2016). Medicinal sciences is of particular interest, as team collaboration is necessary to produce research outcomes (Hall et al. 2008; Gibbons 1994).1 Of the existing data-sets providing details of academic collaborations and knowledge sharing in biosciences, PubMed is one of the foremost sources (Falagas et al. 2008b; McEntyre and Lipman 2001; Anders and Evans 2010). With a collection of more than 30 million citations
on biomedical literature, PubMed (maintained by the US Government funded US National library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health) offers a panorama of publications of diverse qualities and topics. Of great interest is the simultaneous co-existence of research papers not only from the current mainstream of bio-medicine, but also other branches of medical knowledge, such as traditional medicine.2 No two canons of knowledge can be as distinct from each other as bio-medicine and traditional medicine (Baars and Hamre 2017; Mukharji 2016), and yet academic collaborations conform to similar standards of dissemination of knowledge and is available in a common platform like PubMed. In terms of the character 1
* Debdatta Saha [email protected] 1
Faculty of Economics, South Asian University, New De
Data Loading...
