Physics itself has an extraordinarily fruitful history of people reinventing the wheel and getting great mileage out of the contrast and synthesis of many methods for doing the same thing. How many different representations do we have for quantum-mechanical systems? For classical ones? The fact that you can get to the same result along any of half a dozen different paths of derivation is one the the great strengths of physics (and helps a good bit when applying the theory to the real world, when the simplifying assumptions of one path or another may be spectacularly suited or unsuited to what’s actually going on).

Of course, physicists are not the only people who do this kind of re-derivation of existing results—economist come to mind for very much the same kind of blundering disciplinary imperialism.

My May 21st posting:
While I agree that arguing about who did what first is pointless, we should remember that this whole discussion started with the post by Eszter claiming: ‘Some physicists have come out with a paper on the Eurovision song contest. Kieran… reported similar findings over a year ago. So much for this being “new research”.’
In my limited view of the world, this is a public accusation i.e. that the Physica A paper by the physicists is work that has been done a year ago, and hence challenging the claim of ‘new research’.
I go back to my earlier challenge: (and I quote):
‘..can someone actually show that all (or in fact any) of the results reported in the Physica A paper, have indeed actually appeared elsewhere in the social science network literature? Or indeed on any website posting such as Kieran’s? And I mean exactly the Physica A results not just saying ‘someone else has used a dendogram’. There is no law against the use of a dendogram in other fields. And the Physica A dendogram (which is just one of the introductory results in their Physica A paper) is way more complete (and seemingly correct) than Kieran’s—plus better explained as to how they got it etc.
So thats the challenge—please cite exactly the source, page and which figure/result in Physica A paper has appeared before
In addition, please state which of the Physica A results is wrong.’

You/we cannot make accusations without being able to back it up—it makes the exchange on this website meaningless otherwise. It is also probably illegal.

So if the accusation isn’t completely true, I would have thought the right thing to do is for the accusers to apologize on the website. That is what would happen in a court of law, if this were a libel case!
Then we can all get on with doing far more important things than whinging without proper justification.

However, in the real world of careers and financial rewards, the importance of a scientist’s work is measured by citations. Do other scholars recognize this work as valuable?

By completely ignoring prior work, physicists who reinvent the wheel are essentially failing to pay rather modest dues. Not recognizing earlier work sends the message “your work is not worth reading nor discussing. You will not be recognized for your years of hard labor in this topic.” Unless the work in incredibly poor and uninformative, you should always recognize prior work, even if you intend to criticize it and move beyond it.

A related issue is the double standard. Are physicists held to the same standard as sociologists?

Let me give you an example. I recently wrote a paper on a mathematical topic in network theory. I had read about a certain network model in sociology journals, came up with an idea and wrote a short paper explaining the idea, which was not covered in the sociological literature. The reviewers politely pointed out that the result was shown in the 1980s in a probability journal. Fair enough.

Now, let me ask – how many physicists have ever gotten a review that says: these are interesting results, but they seem to tread the same ground as Harari, Lin Freeman or Doug White? Well… (silence). Didn’t think so. That’s why the issue rubs sociologists the wrong way – there is a double standard at work.

Overall, I am extremely happy that physicists are working on network theory. It’s a wonderful thing, but this whole non-citation of sociology is really annoying.

Physicists reinventing the wheel isn’t terribly novel. I believe it was Gell-Mann (though I’m not sure…) who basically reinvented some aspects of group theory to describe the quark model, not knowing that group theory was something that mathematicians had been working on for a long time already.

I’m not sure this problem is unique to physicists though. It seems as though there isn’t much cross-disciplinary discussion in academia, particularly when you start crossing between different “categories” of study, from natural sciences to social sciences to humanities, etc.