The Matthew Effect and the Historiography of Linguistics

• Autor(a) principal: Fernandes, Gonçalo
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10348/11292
• topic: Matthew Effect; university rankings; Web of Science; Scopus; h-index; Historiography of Linguistics

This paper starts by offering an analysis of how society rewards scholars and their contributions to society. On the one hand, it considers the importance of worldwide university rankings, mainly the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings, and the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings. It explains the relevance of publishing papers in journals indexed in the most important databases, namely Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and the h-index. On the other hand, the analysis acknowledges that on many occasions, one can observe an inadequate allocation of credits for scientific work. In order to account for this phenomenon, the sociologist of science Robert King Merton (1910–2003) proposed the principle of the “Matthew Effect”, based on the Parable of the Talents (Gospel of Matthew 25:29). These observations regarding the sociological and institutional contexts of scholarly practice give rise to metatheoretical and methodological considerations on the Historiography of Linguistics (HoL), which from its development as a new linguistic (sub)discipline in the 1970s has aimed to provide a correct account of the history of linguistics, and indeed to attribute linguistic ideas to their right ‘owners’ or ‘authors’. Since a sound methodology is an important precondition for a fair history-writing of the discipline, this paper pays extensive attention to the contributions to this end by our honoree, Pierre Swiggers (b. 1955), and by two of his fellow main theorizers of Historiography of Linguistics, E. F. Konrad Koerner (b. 1939) and Sylvain Auroux (b. 1947).