Understanding Quality in Science: A Proposal and Exploration

Quality is a concept or characteristic that everyone knows, but yet is not well understood or defined. In many cases it is simply recognised as the absence of defects. Indeed when specific criteria are provided this is often in such as way as to enable personal preferences or prejudices to inform the decision. In this paper, we present an overview of the work that we are embarking upon examining quality in science. We propose three analysis approaches that integrate conceptual, functional, and perceptual levels, and combine both qualitative and quantitative techniques. In addition to providing small-scale case studies, we outline future work which is guided by an understanding of quality as a collective process.