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This article presents the response of Noretta Koertge to the recent discussion in the journal of the book she edited. She describes features of scientific method and explains that scientists devote much of their energies to trying to exclude their own biases from their observations, and she lists the familiar techniques that are used to accomplish a degree of what is commonly called objectivity. It is noted that those who work in the history and sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) not only know scientific method and its aspirations, they value and cleave to it. Thus, SSK tries to generalize so that its results can be repeated in other settings, historical details are checked with respondents and, where possible, sources are carefully documented so that they can be checked by others.

This article presents a brief response to the replies by Vicky Singleton and Brian Wynne. The author will base what he has to say on the original papers and his response to them, take account of the replies by Singleton and Wynne, and summarizes his main conclusions from the exchange. The two replies to the author's original response to the Special Issue of Social Studies of Science on "The Politics of SSK" carry on the debate in rather different ways. Hence, the author discusses them separately in this paper.

This article presents a reply to Hans Radder's response to the author's paper. Radder has carefully identified several points which invite clarification and elaboration. It is noted that Radder clearly situates the author as recommending that science and technology studies (STS) accounts should stick to descriptive analyses. Radder acknowledges that neutrality is an illusion and that taking sides can be politically and theoretically problematic, as well as being too narrow an approach for STS. The author's paper suggests that issues surrounding neutrality versus commitment and issues surrounding descriptive versus normative approaches are inextricably linked. However, Radder is able to separate these issues, as his stated aim is to deal only with the descriptive/normative issue which is for him, the neutrality/commitment issue had been dealt with adequately in this Special Issue.

This paper takes the form of a double text which simultaneously investigates the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) through citation analysis, and investigates citation analysis using theoretical ideas from SSK and Foucault. One strand of the text performs an analysis of citation patterns in SSK. This text identifies the figures who have had the most impact through their articles and books, and examines the possible effects of cultural and linguistic bias. It also investigates the impact of SSK outside the field, asks whether this impact has changed over time, and identifies researchers who have had a particularly high impact outside SSK. The other strand takes citation analysis, as exemplified in the citation study of SSK, as its topic. This text focuses on the way the citation analysis constitutes its field of study, and on the way a citation is produced as a separable, countable category. It notes the 'realistic' idea of science categories which is deployed, and the individualistic model of scientific activity. It questions the involvement of citation analysis with power, both in the traditional sense of institutional control of science through funding changes, and in the Foucaldian sense of scientists adopting citation counting as a regime of self-regulation. The paper ends with a dialogue between the 'authors' on/in these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ethnographic or ethnomethodological turn in the history of the human sciences has been a Holy Grail at least since Cooter and Pumphrey called for it in 1994, but it has been little realized in practice. This article sketches out some ways to explore the reception, use and/or co-production of scientific knowledge using material generated by mediators such as mass-market paperbacks, radio, TV and especially newspapers. It then presents some preliminary findings, tracing the prevalence and, to a lesser extent, use of selected social-science concepts in the USA and the UK from the 1930s to the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his response to the Special Issue of this journal on "The Politics of SSK," Hans Radder makes two main points about the relations of politics and sociology of scientific knowledge. First, he argues that science and technology studies (STS) can and should go beyond descriptive analyses of the politics of science and technology, to engage in normative criticisms, assessments or recommendations. Significantly, however, he restricts his vision of this engagement to a certain type of STS normativity. Thus, the role for STS of offering reflexive critique of existing public issue-definitions goes hand-in-hand with the normative role of helping change existing definitions of agency, and of encouraging problematization of entrenched ideas of the human subject, and of human relations.