A Novel Kuhnian Ontology for Epistemic Classification of STM Scholarly Articles

Thomas Kuhn proposed his paradigmatic view of scientific discovery five decades ago. The concept of paradigm has not only explained the progress of science, but has also become the central epistemic concept among STM scientists. Here, we adopt the principles of Kuhnian philosophy to construct a novel ontology aims at classifying and evaluating the impact of STM scholarly articles. First, we explain how the Kuhnian cycle of science describes research at different epistemic stages. Second, we show how the Kuhnian cycle could be reconstructed into modular ontologies which classify scholarly articles according to their contribution to paradigm-centred knowledge. The proposed ontology and its scenarios are discussed. To the best of the authors knowledge, this is the first attempt for creating an ontology for describing scholarly articles based on the Kuhnian paradigmatic view of science.