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Little Science, Big Science... and Beyond

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Columbia University Press Science 62 Based on four 1962 Pegram Lectures given at the Brookehaven National Laboratory.

301 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

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Derek John de Solla Price

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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
27 reviews
February 11, 2023
Diffcult to rate such a book. On one hand it contains, at least for me, novel ideas; on the other hand it is a brick of only 100 pages. I do not understand statistical jargon well, my own demise surely. Many times I wished the author to speak to me as if I was human. I could see the glints of useful ideas hidden behind poor communication. I might revisit the book for sources.
Profile Image for Lourens.
124 reviews2 followers
January 25, 2022
Got the book for one chapter, the early study of citation networks. Was planning on reading the whole thing, but after the second chapter, "Galton Revised", I realized it's not for me. Presents a pretty one dimensional view on what makes a good scientist through statistical regularities on # of PhDs, science society membership and intelligence tests. Not my cup of tea.

The chapter on citation networks is remarkable. It is packed with observations and poses many interesting questions and concepts that are active fields of research up to this date. 4/5 for this.

So far for the wonders of the, oh so fascinating, world of Bibliometrics.
152 reviews
February 1, 2021
a remarkable monograph from the father of bibliometrics that is just amazingly ahead of its time (scale free networks thinking! in 1960! my god!). mandatory reading for anyone studying citations and the academic literature, and perhaps even just for scientists in general. unfortunately, finding a copy is nearly impossible (although the chapters were all previously published as academic papers).

chapter by chapter summary:

'prologue to a science of science' argues that science has been growing at an exponential rate (according to pretty much an sane measure of the size of science), but that this growth phase is about to transition for exponential to logistic, and ponders the consequences of the resulting saturation of science within society

'galton revisited', after some brief hagiography of galton, builds upon galton's eugenic measurement of human attributes to assess the quality of scientists, how often scientists publish, and the growth in the number of scientists. the basic descriptive statistics are eye opening but the chapter otherwise follows a yucky academic tradition

'invisible colleges and the affluent scientific commuter' investigates one consequence of the growing size of science: namely, that communication via papers in journals is replaced by face to face interaction at research institutions organized around unofficial groups price calls invisible colleges. he also argues that primary purpose of the academic paper is to make priority claims

'political strategy for big science' points out that, as science approaches its saturation level (in terms of labor force and funding) in a society, incentivizing marginal participation in requires additional financial and status motivators. due to differing international progress toward the saturation level, there is a resulting saturation gradient that drives brain drain.

'networks of scientific papers' and 'collaboration in an invisible college' are perhaps the first citation network analyses, finding connected components in a coauthorship network (by hand! using index cards!!) and noting that most citations are to recent papers. old papers get cited approximately uniformly at random. every once in while a bunch of knowledge get compacted into review articles and textbooks.

'measuring the size of science' considers the exponential growth of science more carefully, and concludes that majority of scientists to ever exist are currently alive, and additionally that the majority of papers ever published were published recently. further, this has always been the case since science has been growing exponential for nearly ~300 years according to price. note that these essays are from the 60s, and price predicts scientific saturation sometime around ~2000 in the US. another interesting observation is that national scientific productivity correlates well with wealth (perhaps per capita, i forget), and also national energy use (perhaps also per capita)

'citation measures of hard science, soft science, technology and non-science' points out technologists amusing aversion to citation and argues (with data) that STEM fields are more cumulative and tend to cite much more recently papers than the humanities. price proposes the 'price index', the percentage of citations to papers within the last 5 years.

'studies in scientometrics, part i: transience and continuance in scientific authorship' describes author trajectories through the scientific literature and should be mandatory reading for new grad students to understand the reality of how academic works. interestingly, price argues that scientific institutions (such as phds and tenure) where subsequent to a publishing cycle that most people are transient participants in, rather than a cause of such transience

'of sealing wax and string: a philosophy of experimenter's craft and its role in the genesis of high technology' argues that instrumentation proceeds both basic science and technology, rather than basic science leading to applied science leading to technological innovations

i've omitted several other essays from the index or accidentally blended some summaries together, but, all told, this is a truly groundbreaking collection of work to understand scientific publication and the scope of the scientific enterprise, rooted in interesting and easy to read applied data analysis. it is also full of the alternately charming and jingoistic academic style of the 60s
Profile Image for Laxmidhar Gautam.
21 reviews1 follower
October 21, 2024
On quantitative study of scientific communication( or publications), Derek John de Solla Price being "Herald/Father of Scientometrics (or Bibliometrics)", speaks on exponential growth of science and prediction for upper limits. First published in 1963, on this book "Little Science, Big Science ... and Beyond" he speaks about "invisible college" and role of close peers on development of science and refers mavericity of character about enthusiasts known as scientists. As a remarkable personality, with Ph.D.s on "Experimental Physics" and "History of Science", worked on quantitative analysis on citations and developed "science of science". With two astonishing discovery, one is Anti-Kythera machine recovered from Greek ship of first century BC discerned as complex astronomical calculator and other was Tower of winds in the Agora of Athens explained as clockwork driven by water showing times and seasons, wrote nine books and nearly 240 scientific articles.
On the age of Global Mega Science and Artificial Intelligence the quest on sustainability of exponential growth and its limits can be refreshed talk-topics for diplomatic relation between science and policy, do we have answer on "size of science" and requirement/inevitability of "saturation"?
#प्रश्न_गरौँ_उत्तर_खोजौँ
Profile Image for Aaron Michael.
884 reviews1 follower
October 26, 2024
Scientometrics/Bibliometrics

Science has been increasing with exponential growth but will transition to logistic growth.

Law of exponential growth of scientific literature

Pareto distribution

Price’s Law: half the output is produced by the square root of contributors

Concept of cumulative advantage—“Matthew effect”
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