Constructing Credibility: Epistemic Cultures and the Evaluation of Scientific Knowledge Across Disciplines in Egyptian Public Universities

Abstract Scientific credibility is not an intrinsic property of knowledge claims but a socially constructed achievement shaped by disciplinary epistemic cultures, bureaucratic evaluation regimes, and geopolitical positioning. While Science and Technology Studies (STS) has extensively examined the social production of scientific facts, less attention has been paid to how credibility varies across disciplinary formations in institutional settings marked by resource asymmetry and geopolitical marginalization. This article addresses that gap through an interpretive qualitative study of how scientific credibility is constructed, negotiated, and evaluated across the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences within Egyptian public universities. The study distinguishes analytically between credibility—the epistemic legitimacy and warranted authority accorded to knowledge claims and their producers—and recognition—the social acknowledgment, prestige, and institutional visibility that may, but need not, track epistemic merit. Drawing on forty-two in-depth semi-structured interviews and approximately 280 hours of ethnographic observation across seven universities, the study employs an integrated framework combining Bourdieu’s field theory, Knorr-Cetina’s epistemic cultures, and Latour and Woolgar’s credibility cycle, operationalized through five coding dimensions: procedural-bureaucratic, relational-networked, performative-embodied, metric-quantified, and material-infrastructural. The findings identify three credibility modalities—pragmatic credibility in the natural sciences, performative credibility in the humanities, and dependent credibility in the social sciences—understood as dominant tendencies qualified by intra-disciplinary variation and counter-patterns of substantive epistemic engagement. Across the three domains, the article develops alienated credibility as an empirically observed condition within the Egyptian public-university case, in which formal evaluation becomes detached from its epistemic foundations. The concept is offered as a sensitizing category for future comparative research on structurally asymmetric academic fields, rather than as an established generalization about peripheral academic systems.