F"
. ‘
62 Chapler Three
well acquainted with the Vienna Circle’s philosophy, although his inter-cf!
in the construction of an interdisciplinary, unified index was chiefly drivel.
by its immediate practical value as a documentation tool. Bibliographi
citations, actually, had a looser structure and far less conceptual stability
than the primitive concepts expressed in a physicalistic language, but,
long as their symbolic power was relied on, they seemed to fit a simil.
purpose quite well, forming, in Garfield’s own terms, the building b10c ;
of “a plan for accomplishing what Neurath calls ‘an encyclopedic integral
tion of scientific statements.’ what I call a ‘Unified Index to Science?” 1
34- WEAVING THE NETWORK OF SCIENCE:
DEREK JOHN DE SOLLA PRICE
Why shOUId we not tum the too“ Of “ten“ 0" science itself? Why "0t 1
measure and generalize, make hypotheses, and derive conclusions? ' ‘ .‘My '
approach Wt" be to deal StatiSIicauy’ in-a not wiry mathematical fashion, -i
with general problems of the shapeand Size of seience and the ground rules
governing growth and behaVior ofsc1ence-in-the-large . . . The method tobe .'
used is similar to that of thermodynamics, in which is discussed the behav- ':
ior of a gas under various conditions of temperature and pressure.”
11"
The declaration of intent set forth by Derek Price in the preface of Littli '1 to the history of science, including the papers collected in the Philosophi-
Science, Big Science was a clear statement of scientometrics’ researcit
program for the generations to come. His subsequent work in the. field
may be considered the technical fulfillment of Bemal’s legacy, as It 1.6%.
within a few years, to the delineation of a paradigm for science studies.
in the very sense that he not only demarcated the boundaries of the neW.
discipline and the necessary conditions for its existence, but also Showed
concretely how its puzzles could be solved thereafter. ' t.
Price, professor at Yale University since 1959, was a British hletof‘
rian of science and technology with an extensive physico-mathemattcat,
background. His ideas on the nature and evolution of science rest on tw‘t‘
fundamental premises, eventually converging toward a “bibliometnc re;
ductionism” that marks the entire tradition of scientometrics. First, SClenoe‘
is inherently different from other areas of scholarship by virtue of the .0":
jective criteria it adopts in the observation and manipulation of empm [it
data. That’s why “there is in the field of science a cumulative accretion 0;
- l 63
Icontribttttons that resembles a pile of bricks . . . to remain in perpetuity as
‘, an intellectual edifice built by skill and artifice, resting on primitive founda-
P dons-”29 Second, even though, during the stage of discovery, unsystematic
, laboratory life as well as social, psychological, and philosophical factors
-" choperate achely 1“ the. shaping 0f new ideas-and techniques, eventually,
’- when the game is up, seience amounts to published soientific literature. A
,5 scientist, therefore, is not recognized. by having received a certain educa-
’ tion, or working In awould—be scientific institution, but Simply-bythe fact
' ' that, at least once in life, he or she has produced a SCientific publication read
_; , and approved by the community of peers. Coherently with such premises,
. the c0unting, classification, and representation of research publications in
'3 :: the form of temporal series provides a reliable indicator of science evolu-
” 3 tion, whereas the analysis and comparison of temporal series discloses the
V. .1! quantitative laws governing the growth of knowledge. Historians, then, who
. up to that point had limited themselves to investigating either the internal,
qualitative aspects of research activity, or its social, economic, and political
. contexts, were now in the position to manipulate historical records, mainly
, journal papers and the network of citations between them, by the same
:~' methods of in _ ll 1' d h _ l h _ h
.. . qu‘ry. usua y app 16 to P yswa .p enomena, 1” sue a way
3 ‘. as to disclose the nldden patterns of their behav10r.
From the counting and claSSIfication of a huge amount of data related
. ea] Transactions of the Royal Society 0fL_0’td0" and the references. listed
_: In the 1961 edition of Garfield’s index, Price came to what he consrdered
i. the. fundamental law 0f any analySis 0f SCience”: whatever numerical
‘. Infjtcatt’t 0f the various sectors and aspects cf modern science, from the
i aid-seventeenth century onward, 15 taken into conSideration—whether
. u: number 0f. seientific Journals, articles, abstracts, 01' thenumber 0f
;; tiaivelrlsmfis’ISC‘enttftsf 0t engineers—its normal growth rate 15 exponen-
.‘ Of, t at '5, 1t multiplies, 1“ equal periods 0f time, by a constant factor.
' thr course, ance knew that the Size f’f seience doesn’t grow exponentially
; plihmghom “5 escalation and doesn texhibit the same rhythm In at] disci-
_ and es. Funhermore, as befits many natural and 500131 phenomena, 1t 15 1101
[ is r Cannot reasonably be infinite: at a certain moment, a saturation point
- turneaehed when the growth process levels off and the exponential-trend
, Wh's Into a logistical (S-shaped) one. In the saturated state 0f seience,
ich Price predicted for the second half of the twentieth century, things

64 Chapter Three
would look very different from earlier stages because the superabundance ‘
of literature and the increasing specialization, coupled with manpower ,_
shortages and a diminishing number of talented scientists, would impose '
politically enlightened choices about objectives and priorities in the dc- _
ployment 0f scientific efforts.
Turning from temporal series to the cross-sectional distribution of
authors and papers at any given time, Price recognized that the universe .
of scientific communication is dominated by skewed distributions and i
followed Galton’s elitist philosophy in assuming that there exist only a
limited number of people with the talent necessary to become a scientist.
He also sought to give a more precise estimation of such skewness through
a square-root law of productivity, a sort of modified version of Lotka’s
Law (discussed in chapter 4). In a simplified fashion, Price’s Square-Root .
Law asserts that about half of all the papers produced by a population of '
scientists come from a subset of highly productive sources approximately
equal to the square root of the total number of authors.30 This amounted to i
saying that, more or less, “the number of scientists doubles every ten years, '
but the number of noteworthy scientists only every twenty years.”31 Hence,
if scientific literature grows exponentially, one is forced to conclude that '
noteworthy scientists are also the most productive. In other words, the ad-
vance of science does not depend linearly on the sheer number of research- ,
ers recruited at any given period, but on the number, which grows much .
more slowly than the former, of “good,” very productive scientists. .
Obviously there is a snag in the above argument, for one cannot Simply I
infer quality (good scientists) from quantity (productive scientists). Price.
in fact, admitted that quantity doesn’t necessarily amount to quality at
the individual level. Publishing in the Physical Review is not the same as
publishing in the Annual Broadsheet of the Society of Leather Tanners of ,
Bucharest. Even more convincingly, “Who dares to balance one paper 0f .
Einstein on relativity against even a hundred papers by John Doe, Ph-D"
on the elastic constant of the various timbers (one to a paper) of the foreSt _
Of Lower Basutoland?”3t A“ the same, appealing to biographical compila".
tions, such as James McKeen Cattell’s American Men of Science, and tog-1°” ngg to a citation matrix filled with data from the reference network
Wayne Dennis’s study on the productivity rates of scientists listed 1n the:
he;
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs (1943—1952).
made the point that highly productive scientists are also, on average, the“:
who prevailingly show up as starred entries in dictionaries, being Com
it 65 j: hi
'f pmativtely much more honored and rewarded than their lazier colleagues. if:
h.‘ SO. despite flagrant Violations, “on the Whole there is, whether we like it hi.
._ or not, a reasonhbiy good correlation between the eminence of a scientist
.
i and his preduétwnxd papers.”33 Such Correlation is one of the several
, r empiricall manifestations of the success-breeds-success principle, already
g... described by Nierton as the Matthew Effect, by which some sort of capital,
,1 whether material or Symbolic, tends to flow and concentrate in the hands
f of a few who already hold a portion of it. As sections 4.1 and 4.7 show,
g. Price managed also to demonstrate, with the help of Herbert Simon’s .
'-.‘ mathematics, that this structural skewness in the formal Communication .
3 system of scrence can be modeled by a suitable probability distribution ..
(“Cumulative Advantage Distribution”). ,‘
.~ Beyond the number of published papers, a qualitative insight into 1
, the concrete operation of the cumulative advantage process came from ‘
. citation and library usage data. Donald Urquhart’s 1956 analysis of the
. Science Museum interlibrary loan records on one side and the citation .
. patternsihidden in Garfield’s newborn SC] on the other side, revealed that 1
2; the distribution of requested articles among journals stored in a library and
the distribution of citations among papers exhibit a similar hyperbolic pat-
“ tem: a few papers and journals attract the bulk of citations and library user
requests, opposed to much higher percentage of uncited and unrequested
materials. In what would be subsequently recognized as one of the earli-
. . fast examples of scale-free networks with power-low degree distribution, 3
' rice eStlmated that, in any given year, about 35 percent of all the existing '
- EaPerS are not Cited at all, another 49 percent are cited only once, 9 per-
,- :nt_tw‘°e’ 3 percent three times, 2 percent four times, and only 1 percent .
.- cirettilme-s or more, thus leading to Conjecture that the number of papers
‘_ O '1 times decreases, for large n, as he5 or n”.
i of thn tOP Of all this, the story written between the lines of the 1961 edition
I true e SCI IUmed out even more instructive than that of a land ruled by
deedundernocracy. The statistical distribution of citations manifested, in-
.' ICSOF’IFWO ImPOt’tant underlying regularities, which Price also exemplified,
; -COntained spurious specialty, the N-Rays research field.
1. Half .
Port" the referenccs pomted to a loose and somewhat randomly defined
_ lOn (about half) of all the papers published in previous years, whereas
 fl
7‘
. »

66 Chapter Three I»
.' .- 67
.
the Qther half referred to a small er, tightly defined subset of earli' er lltera
'
.,
:
in" '2:could have u nder
. estimate.d the structural varia
. .. . bility of reference net-
.
ture. “We may look upon this small part. 601111113“ te d Price . “as a sort '. cross screntific domains. They also replicated
. h f nt ”34 Ofr, a _ . the N-ra
ys analySis
grow'mg ti P or epidermal layer1, an active researc ro . _' d-Scovered that, had Price .
taken into account self-Citat_ions, the
re recent than the rest whereas the. L21 .d I . 38 effect
2. The most crted papers were a so ,overcitation to recent papers would
m0a er decreased exponentially by have almost faded out. The new
chance of being crted for any one a' hnique of co-citation analysis Wher
tp :riods of time (about 1 3 5 years)- eby, after Small and Griffith, many
a . iithors were seeking either to clarify
COhSt aht factor (about two) m equ ti;at “about half ' the specialty structure of science or
. the bibliographit; ‘ " ;,
,t track down the contours of such a puzzling . .
this suggested. as a rough guhsht links
with rather recent papers the;= l, a entity as Kuhn , s paradigm
s
.
references 1“ papers represent} ”g fee chapter 5), revealed one further . .
d less tight linkage to all that has remarkable property of imme diacy,
'
other half representingttt tr ely its tendency to increase duri
tltum orm an » » ~' .
ng the periods of intellectual focus
'. trually coupled wrth . . .
been PUthhed before. screntific revolution s.39
f 1 ,I As to the research front, Price conjectu
red it might correspond, by and
‘ -
’ v‘ew the “immediacy factor,” the marked propenSIty ' ‘-
t0 OVCFClte . t.'. .ge, to the work of a few hundred ve ry produc
. tive, heavi
. l y cited scien-
In Price 5 1 1d it es . in addition to demarcating sci-"- it ts, and the content of a few thousand core journals. Within each
recent papers at the expensetotfto e'r 0 the social scien . . . field,
.e., ces and the humani—
ence
- from other schol arly
. it
‘r research front advancem. ent is. drive. n by an informal communic. atio
.
n
‘ aCUtV ItleS ((11
ties), accounts for "5 chmumwe 3: fpl' tgln o ressi ve chara cter ’ and vouches for . .
r.’. twork of scholars forming a highly interactive, tight grou
1970 he propounded a simple:" lie . . . p of prod uc-
screntists who, beyond national and insti. . . .
the existence Of an active fiscal; 'ron levels of immediacy chara tutional boundaries , col-
diagnostic tool to detect the dr enitg
tt wled 6 production occurringstic?
cteri fborate via face-to-face communication and preprint exchange
- in“ it ’cblems, techniques, and solutions. to define
of the structurally diver se modes o . Price labeled these informal clusters
0 It: 010 g and the nonsc
iences' the . . a .
'
the hard scrences, the 50h sciences, tierefer
. n 9
pmpnsmg everybody . ,, . .
who 18 really somebody in a field
“Price’s index, re, the Percentjtget‘t’ eges to documents not older ' r“ ,
eges,’ after Robert Boyle s epithet for the pione
, . .
inViSible col-
n of the citing sources 36 ers of the Royal Socrety .

' ‘5 London, and claimed that they

than five years at the time ofPU f rca io
th references appended to 'papers . serv ed essen tiall y a twofold purpose:
An early statistical analysrs 0 in the .ypassmg the communic. atio . .
n difficultie . .
e . s brought about by the explos10 n
1963—1965 volumes 0f the Monthly Notices ofthe Royal Astronomica - I 50. f in scien tific liter ature and best
. the mid 1960 5 showed the concrete“ . . . owin g on each memb er the share of credit
- “caved from the esteem and recognitio
crety carri' ed out by JaCk Meadowsl n - n of his or her topmost peers.
. - - stro nomi cal liter ature '
The auth0f1.,_-P1‘1Ce 5 constructi . . .
operation of the immef ilac)’ factor m..-a ediacy index ,, defin ' -. '~ .
of the mvrsr ble college is .
rather ambi.guous. In a
measured its effect by mtroducmg ed as “the . .
Ittnote to Sczence Smce Babylon, m .
an "m" _ d'vided by the. fact, he cast a shadow over the
total number 0f or'ta tions to literature of the last Six years i fSll‘ability and even the historical
than twenty years old ”37 and _. it“ el't neces sity of these informal clusters
. . ~ - - .
total number of Citations to ltiteraturte mob‘re ’ i
I e scren tists , whic h he characteri. zed as exclusrve . a
power groups. ”to
ect area Later expe riments by .
‘ tOreover, havmg had the opportunit. y, in.
noticed its variability according tot eds;l . .
.
. - JSté ane.Baldi and Lowell Hat-'- collaboration wrth Donald DeB.
Belver anfith on phySlCS journals 93V”, to dissect the information flows
an _ lyelafivity and two social science, ‘l ;. in a tightly controlled group of
t'Ple presumably constituting a smgle . . .
.

gens on the. reference

. cluster in the field of “Oxrdative - .
, netw
. orks
- 0f Spejta fan d role algebra analysis) shed:
subspecraltres (spatial drffusron mode _. t-tto
. sphor ylati on and Term inal Electron Transport,” he realized that the
. - - 12g 6 of the research front on past. - . .
further light on the biblionghlc ' nc 0; t-e majonty of interconnected authors . . .
depent e ediac effect might have . a-J- . i . .
contribute only mini mally to the i
literature- Griffith conjectured that th?‘ d: tUSually by vrrtue of a floating collaborat . . . .
tem :round the 19205, Ball“ ion wrth highly productive
invented by the science communication sys germs“. and that separate and relatively unconnec
. . ps seem toted grou
' the social science specralties, a pattern c lose to. tli'
and Hargens foun d . In -
ft "1 What would otherwise appear to be
a. s c a single invisible college."
I.
. . h otheslz" , _
0 ne Price would Probably ascribe to the human orlCluSion , taken very seriously by all subseque
ities, so they yp .1 nt advocates of the
i
 69
‘ .
68 Chapter Three
nce) is A. lack MeadowS,
ric assessment, handed , munication (inelilding, bibliometric Sources of evide
research group as the basic unit of any scientomet -
concretely the fine Communication {n Seience (London: Butterwonhs, 1974)
over to posterity the challenge of determining how 2, Both the [ltle of this section and the discussion on Bemal
’s information
s the vast territory. .
structure of an invisible college could be spotted acros
of science. Starting with Diana Crane’s Invisible Colleges in 1972,“2 the . science areCindebtesjtchgve Muddiman, ‘Red Information Scientist: The In-
' formall‘gll1 M22331“: R. (1:111:11, Journal of Documentation 59, no. 4 (2003);
contributions of authors who took up the challenge increased at such a' . . n. e n Grimm." _SCience: J.D. Bemal and the National-
the subject ap..‘-. . 387.-40 ,
that an annotated bibliography explicitly devoted to ” in Conference
“3 d ' 11 While the initial emphasis was -. ization 0f Screntific Information in Britain from 1930 to 1949,
pace
Peafed 35 early as 1983.‘ Para OXICa y, ' - - - ‘ on the History and Heritage of Scientific and Technological Information Sys-
on informal communication patterns and socml relations among selentls"? '- tems: Proceedings of the 2002 Conference, ed. W. Boyd Rayward and Mary E
e, subsequerli: :‘itzois (:1:elletdvpng : Information Today, cal
Bowden, 25.8-66 lMedford, N.J.: ology for the Amer ican Society
supposedly belonging to the same cliqu
n Vior em 0 ie' in Inc 0 . oflnformatlon Science and Techn and the Chemi Heritage Foundation,
marily on the formal communicatio beha dimampdf.
d
of scientific publications and relie heaVi ly on bibl iometnc techniques for ; 2004), www‘Chem'hentage'orgIPUbS/aSiSQOOZ/Z1'l‘l‘lud
testing hypotheses referred to the informal substratum.“ Later socml. 3. Bemal, The Social Function of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
rehensron of “I? 1967), 373.
gists would blame this choice as inadequate for the comp
. 4. Bemal, The Social Function, 303,
social processes and information flows that properly govern an inVistbl-s.
; 5. Bemal,,The Socml fullction,.300_
college, and would opt instead for methodologies and observation techg'
F 6"_Wa:15409n zsproposal is republishe d as an appendix in Bemal, The Social
niques typical of the ethnographic style of investigation. Yet the idea that Berna],-The- sou-a] Function, 294'
7- '0",
made the
be come
‘ :e could to most
visib le with ui
fruitfthe "' "”0
' e structure of scion
the communic' ativ
1 d ion,_306.
tionl Funct . . n
t .6 years . i ' . d, I 9. Bemalld,
8. Garfie “Cita
, The Socia
0 1??
help 0f Cltanon analySIS mg?
research lines in the area
In tnc
tome mapping. .
Ch . ' n exes New Paths to Seientific Knowledge, The
‘ ' lf ' 'oned the drawing of a comprehenswe bibliometns
tm 43’ 4 (1956
"0'servi ): 11’ WWW-garfieldJibrary.upenn.edu/Papers/
hlmsce
of scien
Pncc
map apoli"tical
e as“V‘s ' lly fe asibllae ob'e
' ly desn' able and tec h mca. ctiv
faJvor th 8mm
- 3l.htm l.,The
Bulle
aware ness ce set up by the 181 in 1965 was called ASCA

He felt that’ if properly manipulated, Citation matmte: cou ' V6 (Antomatic Subject Citation Alert). It was different from competing clipping ser-
automatic identification Of “classic” and ‘ superclass rc paper 1;;0 V
s . “‘2“; as It used 'citations, besides words, authors, and other conventional access
research field, whereby the stratified structure 0f the Cltatlon w . g SEQ-5:0 build mdmdual interest profiles against which, each week, the newly
COUId be dug out. This, in turn, WOUId be the first, elementary step to s- ’. ASCII: edbliterature was matched to build personalized reports. In addition, the
the completion Of a detailed topographic map Of all researchfleldS, a h‘8 . allemasu lSCnber could receive tear sheets of the articles listed on the report or,
of “war map” eligible for science administration purposes. With 5116 Z - Service lvse y, could order them by using 181 Original Article Tear Sheet (OATS)
topography established—he contended—one could perhaps indicate th. Disserl‘l'inaf'e Ggrfield and Sher, “ISI’
Chemi cal ience
S EXPer Docums entat ASC7’A—a
with ion no. 3Selec tive
(1967 ):
153 wilt/i gteg’l-bjo umal of
ap and relat ive impo rtan ce of journ als and, indeed, of countries, ail-14 u .
overl the S ‘
l “Rev‘eiew~lofrary. . .
place they occup ie d Withi n the map '7 ' 10. Bema
’ .ga upenn .edu/ essay s/v6p 533yl983.pdf.
' ' rdua
thors . or mdtv .' l paper s by the . ' . - t w . . crence Citation Index, Sczence Pro re” 53, .

AS discussed 1" Chapter 5* a large'“““" maiifmiigoie ct (grihisthype . l’ary.uPCn

d.lib. shed n.edu"/essa ys/v5p5I lygl98 l _ 82 . p2:.
undertaken durin g the 1970 5 by Henr y Sma an 6 ve r ' *‘-
,
tel:
'1.
‘ The: amcle
(1965) - ,9,ongma
455—5 www.g arfielpubli
. . lly . Memo
m “Scie d
an Technology
I . 1n a D . n , “CC

. ‘1154 emOCratic Order, Journal Of Legal and Political Sociology 1 (1942):

NOTES { Scie 6’”w_aS subsequently reprinted in Menon, “The Normative Structure of

- i ilionsncg’m In The .SOCiOIOgy of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investiga~
I. An early remarkable survey that pulled together the threads 0f.pre:!¢)".- -i ’ ks9‘:1:8 (Chicago: The University Of Chicago Press, 1973), books.goog1e
boo -1 —ZPvcHuUMEMwC_
etudies covering both the informal and the formal patterns of seientific