ABSTRACT
Robert Merton made a powerful case for theories of the “middle range” in the social sciences, as those theories are best able to combine meaningful theory and empirical evidence. In the social sciences, most quantitative works based on aggregate data published before 1950 are outdated, because W. S. Robinson’s article, “Ecological Correlation and the Behavior of Individuals”, succeeded in driving scholars out of ecological analysis and into survey research, itself made possible by technical advances. Since science is a cumulative enterprise, the deaths are perfectly understandable; the journals are layers of sediments of knowledge before becoming cemeteries. Some dead or dying books stimulated scientific progress in the course of their assassination. In many fields of the natural sciences, graduate students read introductory textbooks which cover increasingly narrow topics; the findings presented are sufficiently well accepted to be formalized in such teaching materials.
