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Just to mention two more examples of obliteration. One is the notion of
“the exponential growth of scientific literature”. Derek Price formulated the law
of exponential growth of scientific literature in 1950 in his paper to the 6th
International Congress for the History of Science at Amsterdam. Before long,
scientists from different disciplines obliterated it and took
the exponential growth
for granted. The notion of “paradigm shift” is another example. Phrases such as
“new paradigms” and “a paradigm shift” frequently appear in scientific literature
without direct citations to Thomas Kuhn's seminal topic
The Structure of Scientific
Revolution
(Kuhn
1962
).
In information science, an “obliteration” hallmark is the annual Award of Merits
from the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). The
Award of Merit is the highest honor of ASIS&T for individuals who have made an
outstanding contribution to the field of information science. Henry Small of ISI was
the recipient of the 1999 award for his work in co-citation analysis. We will include
some examples of his work in this chapter. Don Swanson, professor emeritus at
the University of Chicago, was the recipient of the 2000 for his renowned work in
undiscovered public knowledge.
In
Science since Babylon
, Derek Price (
1961
)usedtheterm
invisible college
to
emphasize the role of informal networks of scientists in scientific communication.
The term was originally used in the seventeenth century's London to refer to an
informal club of artisans and practitioners before the formal organization of the
Royal Society. Diana Crane (
1972
) regarded such informal scholarly communica-
tion networks as the “lifeblood of scientific progress for both the physical and the
social sciences.”
Science mapping has been a long-lasting pursuit for revealing the dynamics of an
invisible college and the evolution of intellectual structures. Derek Price has been
regarded as the leader in the field of
Science of Science
, which is a precursor of
the social studies of science and the field of scientometrics. Scientometrics is the
quantitative study of scientific communications.
In science mapping, we must consider a wide variety of fundamental concepts
that distinguish the level of granularity of each individual study. Such concepts
are known as units of analysis. Examples of abstract units include ideas, concepts,
themes, and paradigms. These concepts are represented and conveyed through
words, terms, documents, and collections by individual authors, groups of authors,
specialties, and scientific communities. The following examples in this chapter
illustrate association relationships between several types of units of analysis, such as
word co-occurrences in text, document co-occurrences in bibliography (document
co-citation), author co-occurrences in bibliography (author co-citation), and patent
occurrences in patent publications (patent co-citation).
Science mapping reveals structures hidden in scientific literature. The definition
of association determines the nature of the structure to be extracted, to be visualized,
and to be eventually interpreted. Co-word analysis (Callon et al.
1986
)and
co-citation analysis (Small
1973
) are among the most fundamental techniques
for science mapping. Small (
1988
) described the two as follows: “if co-word
links are viewed as translations between problems, co-citation links have been
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