Modern technology facilitates the distribution of knowledge immensely. Through Google and Wikipedia, billons have access to an enormous amount of knowledge that previously was hard to get hold of. Still, there is lots of knowledge that is not getting properly distributed, something which reduces the rate of progress. What I'm thinking of is that there is lots of scientific knowledge which would be useful for other scientists, but which fails to be distributed. For instance, when I read history it strikes me that they should have an enormous use of the advances of cognitive psychology in their explanations of various actions. (The same presumably holds for all social sciences. The one discipline that seems to have made lots of use of these findings is economics.) Likewise, statisticians, mathematicians and philosophers of science could, if given the time, point out methodological problems in many published articles. Even within disciplines, lots of useful knowledege fails to be distributed adequately. It happens quite often that someone knows that an article is quite badly flawed, but still does not distribute this knowledge, because of a lack of incentives to do that.

I think that one major problem is that scientific knowledge or information is not properly standardized. Historians can get away with explanations that are grounded in naive/folk psychology rather than scientific psychology because it does not seem like they are making use of folk psychology when they explain, e.g. why this and this king did so and so. Or at least it is not sufficiently salient that their explanations are psychological. Likewise, social scientists can get away with making normative arguments which are flawed, and known to be flawed by philosophers, because it is not immediately obvious that they are giving precisely that argument.

A lack of standardization of terminology, research techniques, and what have you, makes it harder both for humans and intelligent machines to see connections between various fields, to spot flawed arguments, etc. Can such a standardization be carried out, then? This is a perennial question, on which some take the stance that all such standardization attempts are doomed to fail whereas others are more optimistic. Against the former view, I would argue that we have already reached a quite high degree of standardization regarding lots of aspects of research - style conventions, bibliography, what significance levels to use when applying certain statistical techniques, terminology within certain disciplines, etc, etc.

Then again, the anti-standardizer has a point that requiring all researchers to use certain techniques and certain terminology in a certain way risks to become a straitjacket. The answer, then, seems to be that science can be standardized to some extent but not through and through. This is, however, a quite boring and uninformative answer: it leaves open what we can standardize and what we cannot, and to what extent the former can be standardized.

Rather than speculating in the abstract, the best solution is perhaps to try to come up with concrete standardization ideas, and discuss whether they would work. One idea I had, which I am not sure I believe in myself, regarding terminological standardization, is that researchers should be encouraged to write short versions of their articles that would be written on a "canonical form"; which only would use a certain certfied terminology. These short versions or abstracts would, in many cases, not say exactly the same thing as the main article, but they would give an indication of what other sorts of information (e.g. from other disciplines) would be relevant for the article. This would facilitate for researchers from other disciplines (since they would not have to know the terminology of the main article, but merely the translated terminology of the short version) and also, and possibly more importantly, for computer programs. You could feed these short versions into programs which could give you all sorts of valuable data: which disciplines use which sorts of notions, which special expertise seem to be lacking in certain disciplines (e.g. they might use lots of psychological notions without actually knowing psychology, etc).

Another issue is the standardization of research techniques. In medicine, for instance, there has been a lot of discussion on whether randomized controlled trials should be used more or less exclusively or whether other procedures are also valuable. Some people (such as Nancy Cartwright) argue that such standardization attempts are dangerous - that different techniques are appropriate for different problems - whereas others argue that not having very strict rules for how medical research is to be carried out opens the door to arbitrariness and bias.

When one reads scientific papers using stastitical techniques, one is often struck by the number of relatively simple mistakes. These mistakes are not due to some mysterious lack of tacit "practical knowledge" but are rather quite easy to point out and explicate. It would seem to me that this should give room to a more structured research process: one where researchers follow a more or less standardized procedure. I take it that this is already done to some extent.

Anyway, my aim with this post is not so much to give concrete suggestions as to raise a discussion. What do you think: can we standardize scientific methods and terminology? If so, how and in what respects? What consequences would that have? I would much appreciate any suggestions on this topic.