Exploring the Scope of Science Governance: A Scoping Review

Governance of science is intended as an orientation to the behaviors and practice of science system actors through compliance mechanisms and has been studied from different angles. What are the dimensions and aspects of the governance of science in its scope? What are the main focus of the studies and what topics and issues have been less considered by researchers? What research methods have been followed in this field and what methods have not been used much? The method used in this article is the Scoping review method proposed by Arksey and O’Malley. The identified studies were obtained by searching the valid databases. Out of 327 documents obtained, 48 documents met the inclusion and exclusion criteria of this study. Studies have focused on public participation and aspects of the political theory of the governance of science and the ethical challenges of advances in science and technology. The "analytical-descriptive" method and then the "case study" has been the most widely used method in researches of governance of science. The United Kingdom, followed by the Netherlands, are the two countries with the most publications in this area. In terms of time, the growth of scientific production in the last two decades has been increasing, and this shows that the scientific literature in this field is gradually evolving and enriching. "Ethics of the governance of science", "political theory of the governance of science", have been the two sides of this field that have the most works. But "the theory of the governance of science", "tools and methods" and "economics and finance of research" have been aspects that have been less discussed and have not yet reached much theoretical and experimental richness. The researches have used less experimental methods and this shows that this field has the capacity to increase its theoretical and practical richness by using experimental research designs and methods.