James A. Evans
Associate Professor of Sociology and in the College
B.A. Brigham Young University, 1994
M.A. Stanford University, 1999
Ph.D. Stanford University, 2004
Office: Social Sciences 420
Phone: 773-834-3612
Email: jevans@uchicago.edu
Homepage: http://home.uchicago.edu/~jevans
CV: Curriculum Vita
James Evans is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and in the College, member of the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and Fellow at the Computation Institute. His work explores how social and technical institutions shape knowledge—science, scholarship, law, news, religion—and how these understandings reshape the social and technical world. Evans is particularly interested in the relation of markets to science and knowledge more broadly. He has studied how industry collaboration shapes the ethos, secrecy and organization of academic science; the web of individuals and institutions that produce innovations; and markets for ideas and their creators. Evans has also examined the impact of the Internet on knowledge in society. His work uses natural language processing, the analysis of social and semantic networks, statistical modeling, and field-based observation and interviews. Evans’ research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and has been published in Science,American Journal of Sociology, Social Studies of Science, Administrative Science Quarterly and other journals. His work has been featured in Nature,the Economist, Atlantic Monthly, Wired, NPR, BBC, El Pais, CNN and many other outlets.
Research Interests
Social Studies of Knowledge, Sociology of Health and Medicine, Methods and Models,Organizations, and Social Theory
Selected Publications
“Benchmarking Ontologies: Bigger or Better?” (with Lixia Yao, Anna Divoli, Ilya Mayzus and Andrey Rzhetsky). PLoS Computational Biology (forthcoming).
“Industry Collaboration, Scientific Sharing and the Dissemination of Knowledge.”Social Studies of Science 40(5): 757-791 (2010).
“Industry Induces Academic Science to Know Less About More.” American Journal of Sociology 116(2): 389-452 (2010).
“Machine Science” (with Andrey Rzhetsky). Science 329(5990): 399 (2010).
“Nonprofit Research Institutes: From Companies Without Products To Universities Without Students.” Forthcoming in Lis Clemens and Doug Guthrie, eds., Politics and Partnerships: Associations and Nonprofit Organizations in American Governance. University of Chicago Press (2010).
“Novel Opportunities for computational biology and sociology in drug discovery” (with Lixia Yao and Andrey Rzhetksy). Trends in Biotechnology 26(12): 557-562 (2010).
“Open Access and Global Participation in Science,” Science 323: 1025 (2009).
“Electronic Journals and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship,” Science 321: 395-399 (2008).
"Start-ups in Science: Entrepreneurs, New Ventures, and Novelty Outside Business." In Research in the Sociology of Organizations, eds. Martin Ruef and Michael Lounsbury (2006).
"Beach Time, Bridge Time, and Billable Hours: The Temporal Structure of Technical Contracting," Administrative Science Quarterly 49: 1-38 (2004).
"Why Do Contractors Contract? The Experience of Highly Skilled Technical Professionals in a Contingent Labor Market," Industrial and Labor Relations Review55: 234-261 (2002).
