Citation Relations

In a sense, this project is a critical evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of a bibliometric approach to the historical study of scientific disciplines. Thus far, citation tracing has proved to be a valuable discovery tool—among other things, it has helped me pursue the history of language universals beyond a handful of elite North American universities. At the same time, this work has been complicated by the fact that leading citation indexes cover different genres of scientific writing—journal articles, gray papers, edited volumes, conference proceedings, and monographs—unevenly. Such databases have also faced criticism for geo-linguistic biases that are essentially baked in. Finally, they are insensitive to the social dynamics that motivate researchers to cite their colleagues and forbearers…or not.

Future posts will have more to say about the results of “algorithmic historiography,” as applied to the research programs of Greenberg and Chomsky. For now, I merely want to introduce some the bibliometric tools I have been considering through a promotional video that was made by Cine Vision Enterprises on behalf of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1973. Themes potentially of interest here include: the priority of the history of science to the presentation of “scientometrics”; the ways in which “significant” and “important” research articles are defined; the representation of “man-machine processing techniques”; and hierarchies in the scientific labor force. Happy summer!

Please stream this video via the digital collections of the Science History Institute here.

Works cited:

Garfield, Eugene. 2004. “The Unintended and Unanticipated Consequences of Robert K. Merton.” Social Studies of Science 34 (6): 845-853.