Bruno Latour used the metaphor "a laboratory is a factory for papers" in his *Laboratory Life 
*.
From the above Wikipedia link:
> The initial methodology of Laboratory Life involves an "anthropological strangeness" in which the laboratory is a tribe foreign to the researcher. The study of the lab begins with a semi-fictionalized account of an ignorant observer who knows nothing of laboratories or scientists. [...]
> The observer soon recognizes that all the scientists and technicians in the lab write in some fashion, and that few activities in the lab are not connected to some sort of transcription or inscription. The foreign observer describes the laboratory as "strange tribe" of "compulsive and manic writers ... who spend the greatest part of their day coding, marking, altering, correcting, reading, and writing." Large and expensive laboratory equipment (such as bioassays or mass spectrometers) are interpreted as "inscription device[s]" that have the sole purpose of "transform[ing] a material substance into a figure or diagram.". [...]
> Having concluded that the "production of papers" for publication in a scientific journal is the primary focus of a laboratory, the observer next aims to "consider papers as objects in much the same way as manufactured goods." This involves asking how papers are produced, what their constituent elements (or raw materials) are, and why these papers are so important.
Latour is using a Generative Metaphor in the Schön sense: as a way to think new thoughts.