Derek J. de Solla Price

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Derek John de Solla Price (January 22, 1922 in Leyton, England – September 3, 1983) was a historian of science and information scientist, credited as the father of scientometrics.

[edit] Biography

Price was born to Philip Price, a tailor, and Fanny de Solla, a singer. Starting in 1938, he worked as a physics lab assistant at the South West Essex Technical College. He studied Physics and Mathematics at the University of London and received a B.S. in 1942. He obtained a Ph.D. in experimental physics from the University of London in 1946.

Price worked as a teacher of applied mathematics at Raffles College (to become part of the University of Singapore in 1948). It was there that he formulated the exponential growth of science, an idea that occurred to him when he noticed the growth in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society between 1665 and 1850 – he had the complete set in his home while Raffles College had its library built.

After three years, Price returned to England to work on a second Ph.D., one in the history of science from Cambridge University. During his Ph.D. studies, he accidentally discovered Equatorie of the Planetis, a manuscript written in Middle English that he attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer.

Around 1950, Price adopted his mother's Sephardic name "de Solla" as a middle name.

After obtaining his second doctorate, he moved to the United States where he served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His next post was at Yale University, where he worked until his death, serving as the Avalon Professor of the History of Science and chair of a new department that encompassed the histories of science, technology, and medicine.

In 1984 Price received, posthumously, the ASIS Research Award for outstanding contributions in the field of information science.

His scientific contributions include

the establishment of scientometrics through his study of the exponential growth of science and the half-life of scientific literature (Price 1963)
the examination of interactive communication patterns of scientists (Price 1965)
the analysis of the Antikythera mechanism
his interpretation of Herbert Simon's theory on cumulative advantage processes, or Robert K. Merton's Matthew effect, respectively (Price 1976)

[edit] Seminal Publications

Derek J. de Solla Price (1961). Science since Babylon. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Derek J. de Solla Price (1963). Little Science, Big Science. New York: Columbia University Press.
Derek J. de Solla Price (1965). Networks of Scientific Papers. Science, 149(3683):510-515, (July 30).
Derek J. de Solla Price (1970). Citation Measures of Hard Science, Soft Science, Technology, and Nonscience, in Nelson-CE., and Pollock-DK edited Communication among Scientists and Engineers,Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, pp. 3-22.
Derek J. de Solla Price (1974). Gears from the Greeks : the Antikythera mechanism : a calendar computer from ca. 80 B.C. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (New Series), Volume 64, Part 7, 1974, pp. 1-70. (Also published as a book in 1975 with the same title: New York : Science History Publications.)
Derek J. de Solla Price (1976). A general theory of bibliometric and other cumulative advantage processes. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 27:292-306. (1976 JASIS paper award).