He is an expert in scientometrics and the history of science.
Today’s scholars have a love-hate relationship with the Science Citation Index (SCI). It was introduced in 1955 by American information scientist and scientometrician Eugene E. Garfield (1925-2017). That year, he published an article titled "Citation indexes for science" in Science magazine, and proposed the idea of ??citation indexes (SCI) for the first time, aiming to provide a bibliometric tool. To help scientists find and identify professional literature of interest. Garfield founded the ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) in 1960, established the global SCI database in 1963, and began to publish SCI annual data in 1964, and then began to publish the Social Science Citation Index SSCI annual data in 1973 and began publishing annual data from the Arts & Humanities Citation Index A&HCI in 1978. During his lifetime, he served as the lifelong honorary chairman of Thomson Reuters Corporation.
The International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics established the "Derek de Solla Price Memorial Award" in 1984 Medal) and awarded the first medal to Garfield in recognition of his outstanding contributions to information science and metrology.
The following year, Garfield wrote in memory of Price (January 22, 1922 - September 3, 1983) in the magazine "Scientometrics" titled " "As long as we live and work in this growing field, we will not only miss Derek, but we will be reminded of his impact every day," the article said. . In this sense, he has become eternal."
In this tribute article, Garfield commented: "The 'Science Paper Network' may have been Price's most influential work in information science. It is the work that initially made Price one of the most visible scientists in the world. "Science since Babylon." In 1960, he was appointed chairman of Yale's newly created Department of History of Science. He gave five lectures on turning points in the history of science that defined the fundamental characteristics of modern science. The content was later published in the book 'Science since Babylon'"
This passage portrays Price's two academic backgrounds: he is an expert in scientometrics and an expert in the history of science. .
Price was born in Leyton, a town in the eastern suburbs of London, England. His father, Philip Price, was a tailor, and his mother, Fanny de Solla, was a singer.
After graduating from high school in 1938, Price worked as an assistant in the physics laboratory of South West Essex Technical College for a period of time, and then entered the University of London to study physics and mathematics. At the University of London, he received a bachelor's degree in 1942 and a doctorate in experimental physics in 1946. As a graduate student, he published several papers and a patent for an optical pyrometer. He subsequently traveled to the United States on a Commonwealth Fund fellowship, where he worked for a year in Pittsburgh and Princeton before returning to England in 1947.
In the same year, he married Ellen Hjorth (1925-1995) in Copenhagen, with whom he later had two sons and one daughter.
In 1948, Price went to work at Raffles College of the University of Malaya in Singapore as an applied mathematics teacher. There, two events had a profound impact on his later academic development. First, he met C. Northcote Parkinson (1909-1993), a naval historian at Cambridge University in England. Parkinson sparked Price's interest and passion for history. Second, Price was responsible for organizing the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in the university library. When he arranged the journals in chronological order from 1665 to 1850, he noticed that the height of their stacks by year increased exponentially over time. Price later recalled: "I stacked them neatly in chronological order against the wall in my bedroom...I noticed that their height formed a beautiful exponential curve..." He then came up with the idea that scientific development may also be exponential. He came up with the idea of ????elastic growth and many years later designed a mathematical model to describe this growth law.
Price returned to the UK after working in Singapore for three years. He decided to change his research direction and came to Cambridge University to study for a PhD in the history of science. In the Peterhouse Library of Cambridge University, he unexpectedly discovered a manuscript written in Middle English, "The Equatorie of the Planetis", describing an astronomical planetary locator (Equatorium). So he used it as the subject, completed his doctoral thesis in 1954, and published a scientific history monograph about this planetary locator the following year. Price believed that the planetary equator manuscript belonged to the "father of English literature" Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1400-1340 BC), because Chaucer also wrote another article on astronomical astrolabe. However, after later research, the manuscript was actually left by the British ancient astronomer John Westwyk (about 1400-1350 BC).
While studying for his PhD in Cambridge, Price met the Chinese science historian Noel Joseph T. M. Needham (1900-1995). Because of Price's work on planetary equators, Needham invited him to participate in a research project on astronomical clocks in medieval China. This collaboration allowed Needham, Wang Ling and Price to jointly publish the book "Heavenly Clockwork" in 1960, the main content of which was later included in Needham's masterpiece "History of Chinese Science and Technology". Wang Ling (1917-1994) was a native of Nantong, Jiangsu. He studied history at Cambridge and was Joseph Needham's main assistant in his early research and writing on the history of science and technology in China. In 1968, Price also published an article about the hydraulic clock in Athens, Greece.
After receiving his second doctorate, Price immigrated to the United States in 1957. He began his career as a consultant on the history of science at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where he helped establish the National Museum of History and Technology. He later worked at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton until 1959, and then went to Yale University as a professor in the Department of History. In 1960, he served as department chair and director of the university's Peabody Museum of Natural History. In 1962, Price was promoted to Avalon Chair Professor. He worked at Yale University until his death from a heart attack at a friend's house in London in 1983 at the age of 61.
Price began researching the mysterious "Antikythera mechanism" in the 1950s.
This machine was salvaged by divers in 1900 from the wreckage of a sunken ship in the waters of Antikythera, northwest of Crete, Greece. It has since been collected in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. It has a complex structure and unknown functions. Many researchers have analyzed it through various technical means, and the conclusions are divided. Price published two papers on the mechanism in 1959 and 1974, stating that it was a calculation machine for planetary orbits and that its manufacture could be traced back to between 65 and 80 BC. In 1959, Price published a cover article "An Ancient Greek Computer" in Scientific American, describing in detail and trying to initially restore this complex machine. He wrote: The machine "has been corroded to the point of collapse for two thousand years under the sea, but its dials, gears and nameplates still present mysterious mysteries to historians. ... It may change our understanding of ancient Greek science. Lots of speculation." He pointed out: "As far as we know about the science and technology of the Hellenistic age, it should be considered that such a device is impossible." He believes that it was the first example of "High-Tech" in history. In 1974, Price published the paper and monograph "Gears from the Greeks: The Antikythera Mechanism—A Calendar Computer from 80 B.C." Geared calendar devices were compared. Price used the term "computer" throughout, meaning that the machine was like a computer that used the continuous motion of rotating parts to simulate specific astronomical and calendrical time period relationships. Prior to this, Price also published a highly influential history of science book "Science since Babylon" in 1961. His research on the history of science pointed out that the Babylonians were the first generation of "programmers" and their astronomical mathematics read like the printout of today's computer programs, reflecting the complexity and advancement of ancient Babylonian technology.
In 1963, Price published a well-known quantitative science popularization book "Little Science, Big Science" (Little Science, Big Science). This book remains the most cited of all his works.
In 1965, Price gave a lecture entitled "The Scientific Basis of Science Policy" at the Royal Society in London, expounding his concept of "Science of Science". In the same year, the report was officially published in Nature magazine with the same title.
The basic ideas of Price's science and measurement science come from the square root law later named after him, that is, "Price's law". This law states that half of every job is performed by the square root of the total number of people involved in the job. For example, if 25 authors have published 100 papers, 50 of them were co-authored by 5 authors. This 5 is the square root of 25. This ratio can also be used to reflect other social phenomena.
Of course, Price was not the first person to study this relationship between the number of authors and the number of publications they published. Statistician Alfred J. Lotka (1880-1949) studied this type of problem very early and proposed a "Lotka's law": the number of authors publishing n papers is approximately equal to n The reciprocal square of . In other words, the total number of authors who published n papers is one n square of the total number of authors who published one paper. For example, the number of authors writing two papers is about 1/4 of the number of authors writing one paper, the number of authors writing three papers is about 1/9 of the number of authors writing one paper, and so on. It can also be estimated that the total number of authors who published only one paper accounts for approximately 60.79% of the total number of authors.
As the saying goes, there is no earliest, only earlier. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) pointed out a century ago that the number of good-quality products in any product set n is approximately equal to the square root of n.
Many calculations in modern academic work and literature are based on Lotka's law and Price's law. These two laws are similar to the "80-20 rule" proposed by Italian engineer and economist Vilfredo F. D. Pareto (1848-1923). This law says: Usually 80% of the contributions are made by 20% of the people. Lotka's law and Price's law are also likened to the Matthew Effect (Matthew Effect), which is derived from the Gospel of Matthew: "To everyone who has, more will be given, so that he will have an abundance." ; Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.” This vividly describes the economic law and social phenomenon that we often say today: "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
In 1934, the British mathematician Samuel C. Bradford (1878-1948) described a pattern called "Bradford's law", expressed in terms of to estimate the exponentially diminishing returns of searching for references in scientific journals. For example, journals in a field are divided into three groups according to the number of articles, and each group accounts for approximately one-third of the total number of articles. Then the number of journals in each group will be in the proportion of 1:n:n?, that is, a small number of journals publish a large number of articles while a large number of magazines publish only a few articles.
In 1949, Harvard University linguist George K. Zipf (1902-1950) also published a statistical experimental law based on a large amount of data, called "Zipf's law" (Zipf's law) Law): In a natural language corpus, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its ranking in the frequency table. Specifically, the word with the highest frequency appears approximately twice as often as the word with the second most frequency, and the word with the second most frequency appears twice as often as the word with the fourth frequency, and so on, so all The results follow a power law distribution.
Price has conducted many quantitative studies of citation networks between scientific papers. His article "Scientific Paper Network" published in Science magazine in 1965 pointed out for the first time that both the in-degree and out-degree of the citation network conform to the power law distribution. This paper provided a concrete example of the early discovery of what is now known as "Scale-free Networks".
Speaking of scale-free networks, we cannot but mention the "Price Model". In 1976, Price published a paper "A General Theory of Bibliometrics and Other Cumulative Advantage Processes" in the Journal of the American Information Society, and won the magazine's best paper award of the year. Inspired by the power-law distribution random model of "generalist" Sima He (Herbert A. Simon, 1916-2001), Price introduced a specific network mathematical model in this paper to Describe the process of citation network growth and the rules for generating degree distributions. The network model is based on a "Growth" process of the number of documents and a document citation mechanism with cumulative advantages, which is today called "Preferential Attachment". Price mathematically proved that the cumulative node degree distribution of his new model reflects in some unified form the Bradford's law, Lotka's law, Pareto's law and Zipf's power law distribution mentioned above. .
Perhaps because in Price’s time people did not yet have high-speed computers and large-scale databases, especially the Internet, experts in the field of econometrics did not pay much attention to the Price model. Others Most scientists in the field don't even know it exists, so the model is not widely known. Until 1999, Albert-László Barabási (1967-) and his doctoral student Réka Albert (1972-) published a paper in Science The extremely influential paper "The Emergence of Scale in Random Networks" inspired researchers' interest and enthusiasm in what was later called the "BA scale-free network model".
It is now known that the BA network essentially "rediscovered" the Price model. However, the Price model describes a directed network and the BA model describes an undirected network. They are not exactly the same. Looking back on the history of more than two decades, the most important contribution of the BA model is to bring about a wave of research on network science in the new millennium, which has played an important role in the development of science.
In 1956, Price founded the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology under the umbrella of the International Council of Science Unions. International Council for Science Policy Studies (International Council for Science Policy Studies) and served as the first president.
In the 1960s, Price was appointed to the Committee on Scientific Information by the National Science Foundation (NSF). This work gave him the opportunity to delve into a large amount of scientific literature, which initiated his later foundational work in scientometrics, and gave him the conditions to analyze various scientific policies and conduct "scientific" research. Price later served as a science policy adviser to UNESCO and was invited to Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Egypt, Germany, India, Israel, Pakistan, Switzerland, the Soviet Union and other countries to conduct investigation consultation and policy research.
In 1976, Price received the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, the highest award from the Society for the History of Technology. In 1981, he won the Bernal Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science. In early 1983, he was elected as a foreign academician of the Royal Swedish Academy. In the same year, he was invited by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AIAA) to deliver the Sarton Lecture.
In 1978, Price founded the magazine Scientometrics and served as its editor-in-chief.
After Price's death in 1983, the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics established the Derek de Sola Price Memorial since 1984. The Derek de Solla Price Memorial Medal is awarded annually to scientists who have made outstanding contributions in the field of scientometric research.
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