The Citation Culture

Abstract

The need for greater accountability of scientific researchers has created a number of new professions. The scientometrician is one of these experts. They measure science scientifically, often on behalf of science policy officals. They are specialized in rating and mapping the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities with the help of huge databases derived from the scientific literature. This is not the whole story, however. The scientometrician is not only a policy oriented professional, but also a social scientist. Scientometricians have a core journal, Scientometrics, jointly published by Elsevier Science and the Hungarian publishing house Akade miai Kiado . There is an international conference which takes place every two years, organized by their scientific association, the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics. Currently, there are a few hundred scientometricians in the world. They vary from a lone individual who is part of a research library or history of science department, to a large collective with around twenty full-time researchers. The professional scientometrician emerged in the sixties. Their creation is intimately linked to the invention of the Science Citation Index (SCI) in Philadelphia (United States). To date, scientometricians cannot boast of many successes. They do not seem to have had a great impact on the science policy of most countries. One cannot acquire a university degree in scientometrics. Its practitioners have to cope with resistance from the scientific community and their results are not always welcomed. Moreover, while scientometricians have only a relatively short history, their prospects are in doubt. It is not clear whether the profession of scientometrics will survive the ongoing revolution in scientific communication (Wouters 1996c). Computer mediated communication is rapidly becoming the principal medium for publication and dissemination of professional and scientific results. In a few years every scientific journal will be obtainable via computer networks and databases (Wouters 1997b, Wouters 1996a). These changes may lead to a crucial shift in the characteristics of the unit of publication, the scientific article. Currently, it is uncertain how this will affect the measurement of science and the development of scientometrics. Since the scientific article is one of the key objects in scientometrics, these changes in scientific publishing may very well lead to the early death of this new profession in its present form. This study is not a history aimed at describing the specialty in its various stages of development in a more or less emphcomplete way. It might be characterized as a footnote to the available history of the sociology of science, providing at most a historically and sociologically informed theoretical argument about one aspect of this history. Yet, strange as it may seem, this micro-history relates to interesting features of present-day science in general. I will argue that the development of scientometrics can best be understood if we analyze this field as both indicator and embodiment of a recently emerged subculture in science: The Citation Culture. This subculture has unwittingly and subtly changed core concepts of modern science such as scientific quality and influence. Because of the citation culture, being cited has profoundly changed its meaning over the last two decades, with a number of consequences for scientists. It has moreover contributed to the transformation of the very essence of science policy, notwithstanding scientometrics's apparent lack of outstanding successes. This study tries to explore the possible meaning of the citation culture for the systematic generation of knowledge. To reach this goal, this analysis does not start with big concepts like power, science or truth. Instead, it will begin from the most humble entity in scientific articles, often merely visible in small-print: the reference.