The attitude of Korean and Indonesian scientists toward Merton’s scientific norms

Scientists’ attitude toward the Mertonian norms of science measures the degree to which scientists adhere to ethical values in research activities. Though the norms are generally applicable in scientific communities, cultural aspects and research experience may create a difference in attitudes. The present study assesses the effect of country of origin and academic career stages on scientists’ attitudes toward the Mertonian norms among 83 Korean and 101 Indonesian scholars. The scientists’ attitudes were assessed by 29 items covering six dimensions of Mertonian norms: personal, national, and global disinterestedness; communalism; universalism; and skepticism. As the instrument used for cross-cultural study, the differential item functioning test of generalizability was first employed to detect and resolve items that might be affected by cultural bias. Further, a two-way analysis of variance was performed to examine the main effect of country of origin and academic career stages on the scientists’ attitudes, followed by a clustering analysis to analyze the type of scientists based on their attitudes. The results showed that all dimensions except for personal disinterestedness were significantly affected by the country of origin, indicating that Korean scientists have a relatively higher adherence to the Mertonian norms than Indonesian. However, academic career stages were found to be significant only for global disinterestedness, with trainee researchers showing higher adherence than established researchers in this construct. Furthermore, the clustering analysis classified scientists into three groups: High adherence to Mertonian Norms, Low adherence to Universalism, and Low adherence to National and Global. The results are discussed in the Korean and Indonesian sociocultural contexts.