UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) The citation culture Wouters, P.F. Publication date 1999 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Wouters, P. F. (1999). The citation culture. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:27 Sep 2021 Chapter 4 The science of science The science of science, or the self-consciousness of science, as I have put it elsewhere, is the real drastic advance of the second part of the twentieth cen- tury. (Bernal 1964) 4.1 Welcoming the SCI At first, the SCI did not seem to have much impact on science. Its existence did not change scientists’ information seeking behaviour. As has already been said in chapter 2, most of them seemed indifferent and the SCI failed to transform the system of scientific publication (chapter 3). The printed journal kept its po- sition as the principal outlet of publication. Scientists as well as librarians and publishers stuck to the methods they were used to. As a consequence, it was more difficult to create a niche for the new bibliographic tool within the already existing matrix of social and cognitive relationships. The SCI was, however, not only a bibliographic tool. Because of the series of decisions taken during its construction, it had grown into a large database which could be used in a variety of ways. Its broad coverage of all sorts of disci- plines within science compensated in many respects for its shortcomings in jour- nal selection. These SCI data appealed to two different groups: the sociologists of science on the one hand, and a motley collection of mainly natural scientists involved in “the science of science” on the other. The latter group especially saw the SCI as the long awaited instrument to study ´and steer science in an objective, quantitative, truely “scientific” way. SCI’s builders had been aware of its sociological and historical potential from the very beginning. Indeed, Garfield had stressed the historical uses of a citation index in his earliest publications (Garfield 1955) (chapter 2). This was not just a marketing strategy, it reflected his genuine interest in science. While constructing the index, he discovered many interesting facts in the data, reflecting interesting features of the scientific process. Together with his director of research Irving Sher, he published some of these findings on a fairly regular basis (Garfield & Sher 1966). When the final product came into sight in 1962, Garfield was quite prepared to draw scholarly attention to this instrument and data collection. He approached three key persons in the realm of the sociology of science: the soci- 79 CHAPTER 4. THE SCIENCE OF SCIENCE 80 ologist of science Robert Merton, the physicist and historian Derek Price and the crystallographer John Desmond Bernal. In March 1962, Derek Price was advised of the upcoming Science Citation Index: There appears to be a great deal that the sociologist can do with citation indexes, but I would appreciate the opinion of an expert on this question. As I interpret comments that have been made along these lines, the citation index itself will not be so important as the research paths it will open for the sociologist who would otherwise be bogged down in the spade work needed to identify pertinent documents1. While Garfield emphasized the use of the SCI to locate documents (the SCI as a bibliographic tool), Price immediately saw the opportunity to get access to a huge collection of sociological data (the SCI as a bibliometric tool). He was thrilled by Garfield’s letter: “I am strangely excited by the material you sent me on the Citation Index Project”2. Intensive correspondence followed, with Price constantly asking for more data (and seemingly getting most of it), as well as giving generous advice about the best way of setting up the SCI. Price wished to create a “calculus of science”, modeled on econometrics and thermodynamics. Not that Price did not care for the more “soft” aspects of science — quite the con- trary. Actually, Price went along with the term science of science only reluctantly. He would have preferred the term humanities of science, as he had called the field in his Science since Babylon (Price 1961). Throughout his entire scientific career he was on a quest for objective, solid, knowledge: I take the position that the workings of science in society show to a sur- prising degree the mechanistic and determinate qualities of science itself, and for this reason the quantitative social scientific investigation of science is rather more succesful and regular than other social scientific studies. It seems to me that one may have high hopes of an objective elucidation of the structure of the scientific research front, an automatic mapping of the fields in action, with their breakthroughs and their core researchers all evaluated and automatically signaled by citation analysis. (Price 1961, 194) This may be called the defining position of the science of science movement. All proponents of the science of science saw the new bibliographic tool as an ideal instrument for the quantitative analysis of science. In 1965, in an article in Nature Maurice Goldsmith explained the objectives of a new Science of Science Foundation, of which he was the first director: “By the science of science we mean the examination of the phenomenon of ‘science’ by the methods of science itself” (Goldsmith 1965, 10). This type of study would, among others, include: the sociology of science; the psychology of the scientist; operational research on science; the economics of science; and the analysis of the flow of scientific information, as well as the planning of science. Its truly reflexive nature was wedded to a strong quantitative orientation: 1Garfield to Price, March 6, 1962. 2Price to Garfield, March 15, 1962. CHAPTER 4. THE SCIENCE OF SCIENCE 81 The science of science begins to merit the name of science since, although some of the foregoing topics were investigated long ago, it is only now that quantitative treatments can be attempted. The new foundation was a prestigious one, two members were even so famous that they scarcely needed an introduction3 (Goldsmith 1965). At the occasion of the foundation’s first annual lecture in that year, Derek de Solla Price spelt it out in more detail in his “The Scientific Foundations of Science Policy”. Science policy should in his opinion be underpinned by the science of science: Let me emphasize that the universal need is for a scientific basis for knowledge about science and technology; the need is not primarily for a collection of policy statements, however wise, or for opinions of scientists, however well informed. (...) We need a special body of scientific knowledge which can be a basis for whatsoever policies, governments and citizens may request. Without such knowledge we might well flounder from one ad hoc decision to the next, and squander resources by adopting impossible ends or inefficient means. (Price 1965b) One of science’s key features, according to Price, is its cumulative structure. And precisely in analyzing this, the SCI would prove invaluable: To use another analogy, depicting the connexions between papers, the cumulating structure of science has a texture full of short-range connexions like knitting, whereas the texture of a humanistic field of scholarship is much more of a random network with any point being just as likely to be connected with any other. It happens that such considerations are most important in current research on the structure of scientific information systems, particu- larly in the new radical tool of citation indexing. When Price wrote this, he was thorougly familiar with citation indexing. He had been aware of its possibilities and caveats since 1962. Yet, this may not have been the main reason for his appreciation of the SCI, those involved in the science of science who were not familiar with citation indexing reacted equally enthusias- tically. For example, John Desmond Bernal, who had been informed by Garfield shortly before Price4 but had not participated in the project, reviewed the SCI in spirited terms: The value of the Science Citation Index was immediately apparent to me be- cause I had tried to do the same thing in reverse order in writing about var- ious aspects of the history of science. (...) Its essential value is, as claimed to be, that it is a new dimension in indices which should enable the polydimen- sional graph on the progress of science to be mapped out for the first time. Such a graph is a necessary stage in drawing up or planning any strategy for scientific research as a whole. (Bernal 1965) 3“The Advisory Committee of the Science of Science Foundation at the moment consists of Lord Snow, Prof. Derek J. de Solla Price (Avalon Professor of the history of science and medicine, Yale University), Prof.