ARE SPACE STUDIES A SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE IN ITS OWN RIGHT?

In this paper we present a bibliometric analysis of the disciplinary composition of space studies, which specifically targets French participation in space research. We used as our database all the scientific papers resulting from space experiments that occurred between 1965 and 1990 in which French researchers were involved. Our aim is to characterize the disciplinary behaviour of participants in space studies, involved in a field in which instrumental specialization could provoke segmentation, if not relative cognitive autonomy. Our sample is compared to a reference sample of all the publications in the field of astronomy and astrophysics in 1980, and to a sample of publications in radio astronomy. The editorial behaviour of the scientists involved in space studies is barely different from that of other astronomers or astrophysicists, except for the larger number of co-authors. The distribution of papers (as opposed to technical reports and conference proceedings) dealing with space studies in scientific journals does not differ significantly from that in the reference sample. To explain this disciplinary non-differentiation of space studies we propose that it is essentially a scientific area of transitory opportunity for astrophysicists and astronomers who want to use all the available frequency bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.