---
title: "Little Science, Big Science"
chunk: 2/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Science,_Big_Science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:33:03.600077+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

== Galton Revisited ==
In this chapter, Price suggests various ideas and methods about conducting a science of science, or scientometrics, by first narrating some peculiar contributions to statistics made by Francis Galton. His overall goal is to further the possibility of applying scientific methods to science itself by suggesting various metrics and measures of the size, growth rate, and distribution of science. He focuses on Galton's work concerning the distribution of high achieving scientists and statesmen in the upper echelons of British society, specifically Hereditary Genius  and English Men of Science. These works are reviewed with the goal of understanding a basic metric for the number of people or papers in science that reach different levels of quality, an idea basic in Price's formulation of scientometrics. Further, he suggests that understanding such a metric would allow predictions to be made of science and scientists when changes associated with Big Science arrive. Galton's original approach was to estimate the distribution of high achieving practitioners of science among the eminent parts of British society, and Price takes this as a starting step in grasping a scientific metric of the productivity of science. In analyzing Galton's work and the work of another statistics researcher, Alfred J. Lotka, Price suggests that there may be a rough inverse-square law of productivity. Price moves next to define a quantity he calls someone's "solidness" s, as the logarithm of the total papers published in one scientist's life. Keeping in mind the previous productivity law, for each unit increase in a scientist's solidness, the total number of scientists of that solidness decreases at a constant rate. With these two observations, among others, Price asserts that the foundations for an econometric-like study of science have been suggested, with the analysis of time series suggesting exponential or logistic growth and the distribution law of scientific productivity comprising them. He concludes by suggesting that these distributions and analyses contain errors relating to the non-uniform distribution of scientists across populations, noting that they tend to congregate in certain fields, institutions, countries, and journals. In keeping with his gas analogy, he maintains that just as one cannot measure the exact positions and velocities of gas molecules, one cannot pinpoint the exact productivity or contribution levels of individual scientists within science.

== Invisible Colleges and the Affluent Scientific Commuter ==
This chapter serves multiple purposes but overall achieves the same goal as the previous, providing a further conception of the productivity measure in science. This conclusion is reached through defining historically, sociologically, and from a communications perspective what a scientific paper is for, specifically what the purpose of this form of scientific communication is. To begin this analysis, he begins by looking at the history of the scientific paper, tracing its original purpose to discovering what was of interest within scientific practice. With the emergence of this scientific social practice, seen not as a means of publishing new knowledge but of communication between practitioners, the process of situating papers within the general body of literature came in to play. Specifically, each scientific paper is built from the foundation created by all previous papers, and with this facet exists a possibility of quantifying this foundation, the citation of references. With the idea that scientific papers were a social device of scientific communication, Price suggests that the driving force behind their emergent usage was the ability to assert and claim intellectual property within science. The possibility of communicating priority in disputes over scientific discoveries promoted the scientific paper as the best means of communication, leaving the information dissemination quality of papers as incidental in their overall purpose. With the quantification of scientific productivity by citation number and rate, there arrives a metric in science that gives the scientific importance of an individual's work or journal as its total usage within scientific practice, its total citations or references in other papers or journals. With this in mind, Price observes the fact that the total number of scientific references at a specific date across science is proportional to the total literature available within science at that date.
Moving from the ability of scientific papers to facilitate communication and interactions between scientists, Price outlines an idea that allows further maximization of interactions between scientists. His term for this organizational method is the "invisible college," specifically the circuit of institutions, research centers, journals, and conferences that allow intermingling and interactions within specific fields of science. Groups of scientists naturally form as a result of collaborations between individuals focusing on similar problems, but the ability for researchers to move around the globe in order to achieve interpersonal relationships with their fellow researchers is what Price suggests maximizes the group size able to keep up regular productive interactions. Thus Price defines the sociological structure of scientific practice communicating through published papers.