Making Science is Global, Science Culture Remains Local

Abstract

The paper deals with the cultures related to science and discusses, on one hand, ‘scientific culture’ which is global in nature and refers to as the way science and research is carried out all over the world with the same procedures and similar equipment, with the same theoretical tools and mathematical formalisms, with global mobility of expertise, and communicating to a global peer review process performed by the leading academic journals in each field. The scientific culture remains almost constant and can be mapped by sets of scientometric indicators where input and output variables are reported in standard formats. But on the other, ‘science culture’ refers to the way everyday people think of, imagine and value and contest science and scientific knowledge in their everyday life and thus continues to vary with the world’s cultural diversity. We expect that the public imagination and the conversations about science, varies widely along traditional boundaries of ‘deep culture’, with geography, across generations and levels of education and different historical mentalities across the world. There is urgent need for reconsideration of the relationship between this global ‘scientific culture’ and local ‘science culture’ as common sense.