School of Social and Political Science

Research interests

Sociology of Science, Scientometrics, Metascience, Science of Science, History and Philosophy of Science, Computational Social Science, Public Policy

Rhodri Leng is a sociologist of science. His core research programme, as developed in The Matter of Facts (2020, MIT Press), concerns how science develops: how its findings spread and influence opinion, how its ideas come to be accepted or rejected by particular communities, and how those communities grow, fragment, and decline over time. 

His current research is mixed-method, with a particular focus on computational methods, such as citation network and text analysis, and methods of literature review. One strand of this work focuses on developing understanding of how the structure of citation networks affects the spread of information across the scientific literature, how the spread of information affects the development of scientific opinion, and involves integrating this understanding into theories of scientific development. An important element of his work involves developing methods to detect citation bias and other citation distortions in the literature. A different, related strand focuses on understanding how computational methods can inform scientific reviews and case studies of research fields. To date, this has also involved investigating case studies in the biomedical literature – from dietary epidemiology and physiology – policy studies, and astrophysics.

His research thus relates directly to research integrity and to research impact. His approach is data-driven, requiring the analysis of large bibliographic datasets to study the dynamics of publication and citation. These datasets, in capturing the citation links between documents across the history of science, capture dynamics of scientific development and enable the impact of particular findings, particular innovations – and particular ideas and particular scientists – to be mapped and evaluated.  

Completed Projects

ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2021). Project title: Selective citation and the shaping of scientific knowledge: Citation network analysis and the diet–heart debate. 

ESRC Advanced Quantitative Methods PhD Studentship (2016-2019): Project title: Selective citation and the shaping of scientific knowledge: Citation network analysis and the diet–heart debate.

PhD Supervision

Rhodri is happy to supervise undergraduate or postgraduate students interested in the sociology and history of science, the emerging fields of metascience and science of science, or science policy. He is particularly keen to supervise those interested in practices of evidence use in the scientific literature, the use of scientific evidence in policy or industry, or studies of scientific topic and field development.

Find out more about the programmes that I am involved with:

• PhD in Science and Technology Studies
• MSc (R) Science and Technology Studies