ABSTRACT
In 1963 a historian of science, Derek de Solla Price, published a short book in which he outlined the historic evolution of science and, in doing so, laid the foundations for the subject today known as scientometrics: the quantitative analysis of scientific activity that uses such indicators as the number of research papers, publications and citations (Price, 1963). Using very simple data, Price showed that the growth rate of scientific research during the past two centuries has been higher than that of any other human activity. One of the facts cited by Price, which later became proverbial, was that approximately 87 per cent of all the scientists who had ever lived were at work in the 1960s. The total number of researchers had risen from 50,000 at the end of the nineteenth century to more than one million. Similarly, the number of scientific journals had burgeoned from around 100 in 1830 to several tens of thousands; the proportion of Gross National Product devoted to scientific research in the US had risen from 0.2 per cent in 1929 to 3 per cent in the early 1960s. Science had also become a collaborative, as opposed to individual, enterprise: between the 1920s and 1950s, the percentage of scientific papers written by a single researcher published in American specialist journals diminished by half, while the ratio of papers signed by at least four researchers increased concomitantly (Klaw, 1968; Zuckerman, 1977).
