Dan Lester wrote:
>
> Wednesday, July 31, 2002, 7:12:22 AM, you wrote:
> AH>         Yes, Price also noted that if you know how many
> AH>         papers are published, you can reliably estimate the
> AH>         number of authors. Price also pointed out that this
> AH>         measure of 'science productivity' has been true
> AH>         for over 100 years. As far as I know, the science
> AH>         of scientometrics has not detected any change in
> AH>         recent decades.
>
> If there have been no changes, I'd appreciate some more recent
> references to such.  The changes of the last 30 and 40 years since
> Price wrote have been greater than in the 300 or 400 years preceding.
> Changes in technology, changes in grant funding, and changes in
> educational policies and expectations are just a few of them. Even
> though I still remember some of my several years of Latin and how to
> use a slide rule doesn't mean that I regularly use either one today.
>
Thanks, Dan, for getting the argument "back on track."  I don't think
that splitting hairs about abstractions does anything for arguments
about research quality or library funding, but for what it's worth, you
raised questions of historical interest.  The quoted Mr Price pegged the
modern form of the scientific article at "about a century" ago, after a
long period of resistance from scientists who felt that only monographs
could justly cover a subject.  (New ways of doing things are always
resisted!)  Price also noted the rise of collaborative research, which
compensated for scientists with "less than one paper" in them (his
words) and allowed "fractional scientists" to do research!  Donald deB.
Beaver, a former collaborator of Price, offers this in his recent
article, "Reflections on scientific collaboration (and its study)"
(Scientometrics, 52:3(2001):365-77:  "Teamwork, or giant collaborations,
represents a new paradigm for the organizational structure of
research."  He describes how "giant teams" can now deploy great numbers
of students who can bring in a publishable amount of data in three
months in contrast to the five years previously required by a single
researcher with his own student help.  If this isn't a change, I don't
know what is...

You might add to that the increasing internationalization of scientific
research...

Back to work now...

Frieda Rosenberg
UNC-Chapel Hill