It was originally developed building on work in the philosophy of science by Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos.
Subsequently, development has been influenced by the work of Geof Bowker, Michel Callon, Paul Feyerabend, Elihu M. Gerson, Bruno Latour, John Law, Karl Popper, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm Strauss, and Lucy Suchman.
Quoting from Carl Hewitt,[1] scientific community metaphor systems have characteristics of monotonicity, concurrency, commutativity, pluralism, skepticism and provenance.
Karl Popper called the process "conjectures and refutations", which although expressing a core insight, has been shown to be too restrictive a characterization by the work of Michel Callon, Paul Feyerabend, Elihu M. Gerson, Mark Johnson, Thomas Kuhn, George Lakoff, Imre Lakatos, Bruno Latour, John Law, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm Strauss, Lucy Suchman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, etc.. Three basic kinds of participation in Ether are proposing, supporting, and opposing.
Bruno Latour has analyzed translation in scientific communities in the context of actor network theory.
Imre Lakatos studied very sophisticated kinds of translations of mathematical (e.g., the Euler formula for polyhedra) and scientific theories.
Ultimately resolving issues among these viewpoints are matters for negotiation (as studied in the sociology and philosophy of science by Geof Bowker, Michel Callon, Paul Feyerabend, Elihu M. Gerson, Bruno Latour, John Law, Karl Popper, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm Strauss, Lucy Suchman, etc.).
Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon did pioneer work in analyzing the protocols of individual human problem solving behavior on puzzles.
Some developments in hardware and software technology for the Internet are being applied in light of the scientific community metaphor.Hewitt 2006 Legal concerns (e.g., HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, "The Books and Records Rules" in SEC Rule 17a-3/4 and "Design Criteria Standard for Electronic Records Management Software Applications" in DOD 5015.2 in the U.S.) are leading organizations to store information monotonically forever.
Future systems will provide interactive question answering broadly conceived that will make all this information much more useful.
Massive concurrency (i.e., Web services and multi-core computer architectures) lies in the future posing enormous challenges and opportunities for the scientific community metaphor.