The purpose of the paper is to summarize and present stages of formation of behavioral norms of professional communication for the scientific community. The objectives of the study are following: to characterize the meaning of the concept of “scientific community” and clarify its definition; to consider the formation of views on the behavioral norms of the scientific community; to define a set of norms of a modern scientist’s professional ethics. The study presents a narrative review of the literature. During the selection of the papers for review, preference was given to the scientific publications of the classics of sociology of science, in particular published in the form of a monograph and in the journals included to the Web of Science Core Collection. An additional Google Scholar search was conducted to provide a more complete presentation of the scientific results. At the same time, the articles published in predatory journals were excluded from the search (where there are no reviews, the editorial boards of which do not correspond to the subjects of the journals, where articles from journals belonging to leading international scientometric databases, etc. are not cited). We also used the method of analysis of scientific sources, chronological method, methods of classification, comparison, and scientific generalization. The scientists used various metaphors to denote the scientific community: “institute of science” (R. Merton), “field of symbolic production of science” (P. Bourdieu), “invisible college” (D. Price and R. Merton), “social circle of scientists” (D. Crane), “social network of scientists” (R. Collins), “expert reality of science” (P. Berger, T. Luckmann), “scientific discourse” (J.-F. Lyotard). R. Merton codified the norms of science and formulated a “scientific ethos” by proposing a set of four imperatives as normative regulations of science: 1) communism, 2) universalism, 3) disinterestedness, and 4) organized skepticism. T. Kuhn “epistemologized” Merton’s sociological concept of science. R. Merton’s followers T. Parsons and N. Storer developed indicators of the scientist’s profession: a specialized amount of knowledge; high autonomy in attracting and training new members of the scientific community, control of their professional behavior; the need for reward (moral and material). R. Boguslaw rejected Merton’s ethical system as mythological and proposed a set of anti-norms. Later, this system of anti-norms was developed by I. Mitroff, S. Fuller, J. Ziman, and others. P. Bourdieu highlighted the problems of the struggle for a monopoly on scientific competence, the accumulation and investment of scientific capital. Today, the scientific community is understood as a complex system of teams, organizations and institutions that interact both vertically (from laboratories and departments to national academies) and horizontally (the whole set of social institutions, informal groups that do not have an institutionalized structure and administrative regulation). The functioning of the scientific community is determined by the support of the system of values and norms of behavior. Currently, the following key norms of professional ethics of a scientist have been formed: prohibition of plagiarism, objectivity of a scientist; focus on the search for truth; social responsibility of the researcher.
African bureaucracy and public administration: Analysing the normative impediments and prospects