Referencing as Persuasion

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    Referencing as PersuasionAuthor(s): G. Nigel GilbertReviewed work(s):Source: Social Studies of Science, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Feb., 1977), pp. 113-122Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/284636 .

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    Notes and Lettersotes and Letters

    grateful for their invaluable help.14. P. Earle and B. Vickery, 'Subject Relations in Science/TechnologyLiterature', Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 21 (1969), 237-43.15. The classification was performed by I. Schwidetzky, to whom I amextremely grateful. The inter-scorer reliability figure for this content analysisscoring system of citations is 92%.16. The help of Helmut Schlittmeyer in the data collection and analysisis gratefully acknowledged.17. In this citation analysis only different citing author-citing journal pairsacross all four cited volumes have been included. Thus, citing author X, citing10 different Science Studies articles of different years in journal Y, counts only1 'journal citation'. This is done in order to get an idea about the disciplinarycomposition of the Science Studies audience relatively independent of thefrequency with which particular authors cite Science Studies; if one authorcites Science Studies 10 times in an anthropological journal, for instance, thisdoes not seem to me to imply a stronger anthropological fraction in the ScienceStudies audience than if he cites Science Studies only once.18. For more technical detail and information see I. Spiegel-Rosing, 'Aspektewissenschaftlicher Selbstlegitimation', Homo, Vol. 27 (1976), in press.19. J.B. Lodahl and G. Gordon, 'The Structure of Scientific Fields andthe Functioning of University Graduate Departments', American SociologicalReview, Vol. 37 (1972), 57-72.

    20. This difference is highly significant: chi2 = 60.43, df = 14, p = 0.00000.

    Notes and Letters, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 7 (1977), 113-22

    Referencing as PersuasionG. Nigel Gilbert

    The analysis of citations has become common as a technique in the sociologyof science. This journal, for example, has recently published a number of articleswhich rely on citations for a source of data.1 Almost without exception, however,Author's address: Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, GuildfordGU2 5XH, Surrey, UK.

    grateful for their invaluable help.14. P. Earle and B. Vickery, 'Subject Relations in Science/TechnologyLiterature', Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 21 (1969), 237-43.15. The classification was performed by I. Schwidetzky, to whom I amextremely grateful. The inter-scorer reliability figure for this content analysisscoring system of citations is 92%.16. The help of Helmut Schlittmeyer in the data collection and analysisis gratefully acknowledged.17. In this citation analysis only different citing author-citing journal pairsacross all four cited volumes have been included. Thus, citing author X, citing10 different Science Studies articles of different years in journal Y, counts only1 'journal citation'. This is done in order to get an idea about the disciplinarycomposition of the Science Studies audience relatively independent of thefrequency with which particular authors cite Science Studies; if one authorcites Science Studies 10 times in an anthropological journal, for instance, thisdoes not seem to me to imply a stronger anthropological fraction in the ScienceStudies audience than if he cites Science Studies only once.18. For more technical detail and information see I. Spiegel-Rosing, 'Aspektewissenschaftlicher Selbstlegitimation', Homo, Vol. 27 (1976), in press.19. J.B. Lodahl and G. Gordon, 'The Structure of Scientific Fields andthe Functioning of University Graduate Departments', American SociologicalReview, Vol. 37 (1972), 57-72.

    20. This difference is highly significant: chi2 = 60.43, df = 14, p = 0.00000.

    Notes and Letters, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 7 (1977), 113-22

    Referencing as PersuasionG. Nigel Gilbert

    The analysis of citations has become common as a technique in the sociologyof science. This journal, for example, has recently published a number of articleswhich rely on citations for a source of data.1 Almost without exception, however,Author's address: Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, GuildfordGU2 5XH, Surrey, UK.

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    Social Studies of Sciencestudies concerned with one of the several varieties of citation analysis have beenof an empirical nature. Accordingly, despite the occasional cautionary noteon the inadvisability of employing citation data without a sound theoreticalunderpinning, little progress has been made in constructing what Mulkay hastermed 'a theory of citing'. 2 This Note is concered to articulate a theory ofciting behaviour, which might both illuminate the currently available empiricalfindings on the characteristics of references in scientific papers, and perhapsindicate interesting but previously unexamined aspects of citation.Current studies can be divided into three groups according to the differentways they have employed citation data. Some studies have used the numberof citations received by a paper as an indication of its scientific quality,significance or 'worth'.3 Likewise, the number of citations obtained by an authorhas been used to measure the impact of his or her work on the scientificcommunity.4 In other studies, citation patterns have been employed to derivemaps of the structure of scientific specialties and disciplines.5 The third approachcan be seen in two recent attempts to construct typologies of different varietiesof reference and citations by content analysis.6The various studies have made some interesting contributions to our under-standing of science and scientific activity. Nevertheless, their achievementshave been obtained without the aid of an explicit and accepted theory concerningthe reasons why scientists normally cite other papers, and why authors chooseto cite particular papers rather than others. Accordingly, we do not yet haveany clear idea about what exactly we are measuring when we analyze citationdata.

    REFERENCES AS 'PROPERTY'It is true that some very tentative proposals concerning the functions ofreferences can be teased from the available literature. Thus Kaplan in hispioneering paper on citations suggests that

    the citation practices of scientists today are in large part a social device forcoping with problems of property rights and priority claims . . . the citationis probably among the more important institutional devices for coping withthe maintenance of the imperative to communicate one's findings freely asa contribution to the common property of science while protecting 'individualrights' with respect to recognition and claims to priority.7

    Similarly, Ravetz notes that the giving of references is a way ofdividing the property in the published report and providing an 'income'to the owner of the property which is used, by showing chat his work wasfruitful;

    but Ravetz also proposes another function:the citation of the source of materials used in an argument implicitly placesthat source in the argument itself. There is no need to argue again for the

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    Notes and Letters

    adequacy of the materials; that is assumed to be accomplished in the originalreport.8Ravetz's first idea (that references constitute a method of protecting'individual property rights') does not, however, account satisfactorily for the

    presence of those references that seem to be 'negational' in character (that is,those references to papers which the author wishes to challenge or contradict);nor does it explain why 'perfunctory' references which cite, almost as an aside,work which is not apparently strictly relevant to the author's immediate concerns,are often found in scientific papers. But there is another, perhaps more importantreason for rejecting this approach to the explanation of citation practices.It would be valuable to apply metaphorical descriptions such as 'propertyrights' and 'income' to explain the functions of references if such metaphorsemphasized illuminating and significant correspondences between the actionsof scientific authors and of, on the one hand, property holders and, on theother, recipients of a money income. But it is not clear from either Kaplan'sor Ravetz's work that such correspondences do, in fact, exist. Thus, minimally,property has a fixed physical composition, the total value of which is not greatlyaffected by its distribution; it has one or more legally recognized owners; and itis exploitable in order to yield a rent. The 'findings' reported in a researchpaperhave none of these characteristics, and there is thus little to be gained bymetaphorically describing them as 'property'. Similarly, to 'provide an income'implies at least that tokens of direct and immediate value are obtained by therecipient of the income. Again, this feature of incomes is not paralleled in theprocess of receiving citations. There is, for instance, not even an institutionalizedmethod of bringing citations to the cited author's attention. Seeking out suchcitations (collecting one's income?) was an extremely laborious task beforethe recent invention of the Science Citation Index.Not only do these metaphors of property relations fail to match with theknown characteristics of referencing behaviour in almost all respects, but thisapproach is also unable to differentiate between the various ways in which citedmaterial may be used.9 It seems therefore that there would be considerabledifficulties in formulating a theory of citation based on notions of propertyand income which will account satisfactorily for both the observable diversityof meaning between references and the selectivity apparent in authors' choicesof references - and which, furthermore, will lead to new insights about citationbehaviour.

    REFERENCES AS PERSUASIONIn developing an alternative and perhaps more profitable approach in this Note,I shall consider scientific papers as 'tools of persuasion'. A scientist who hasobtained results which he believes to be true and important has to persuadethe scientific community (or, more precisely, certain parts of that community)to share his opinions of the value of his work. For it is only when some degreeof consensus among his colleagues has been achieved that his research findingswill become transformed into scientific knowledge. I have described elsewhere10some of the rhetorical devices which are typically used in scientific papers in

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    Social Studies of Scienceorder to enhance the persuasiveness of an author's argument. Here I shall examinethe contribution references make to the demonstration of the validity andsignificance of the work reported in scientific papers.A scientist is rewarded through recognition for producing results whichare seen as new, important and true. But these qualities are not normally self-evident to the readers of a research paper (whom collectively I shall call the'audience'). Accordingly, authors typically show how the results of their workrepresent an advance on previous research; they relate their particular findingsto the current literature of their field; and they provide evidence and argumentto persuade their audience that their work has not been vitiated by error, thatappropriate and adequate techniques and theories have been employed, andthat alternative, contradictory hypotheses have been examined and rejected.Some of this work of demonstration and persuasion is achieved by logicalargument and inference detailed within the body of the paper. Nevertheless,much support for the results and the argument necessarily arises from workalready performed and presented to the scientific community, and this, as Ravetzhas noted, need only be cited. Nonetheless, such referencing of earlier researchachieves more than the mere incorporation of the referenced work into thenew paper; inasmuch as this work has already been accepted as 'valid science',it also provides a measure of persuasive support for the newly announced findings.It follows that it may be more effective to cite an authoritative paper, thustrading on its acknowledged adequacy, than to redescribe the research withoutreference to the original paper. One can therefore argue that the scientific 'norm',that one should cite the research on which one's work depends,11 may notbe a product of a pervasive concern to acknowledge 'property rights', but rathermay arise from scientists' interest in persuading their colleagues by using allthe resources available to them, including those respected papers which canbe cited to bolster their own arguments.Thus one purpose of giving references is to provide justifications for thepositions adopted in a paper. Another purpose is to demonstrate the noveltyof one's results. This is often achieved by reviewing the current state ofknowledge in an Introduction, and then showing or implying that the findingsreported constitute an advance. Yet another purpose is to indicate, usually ina Conclusion, how these findings illuminate or solve problems which arise fromother, cited work, and thus to demonstrate the importance of the author'sresearch.In these several ways, references can increase the persuasiveness of a scientificpaper. However, not all the relevant articles which might be cited are equallyvaluable in providing such support. In order to justify an argument to an audienceof potentially interested readers, it is most effective to cite a selection of thosepapers which the intended audience believe present well founded, valid results.12The participants in a mature field will share a belief that some published workis important and correct, some other work is trivial, perhaps some is erroneous,and much is irrelevant to their current interests. Hence, authors preparingpaperswill tend to cite the 'important and correct' papers, may cite 'erroneous' papersin order to challenge them and will avoid citing the 'trivial', and 'irrelevant'ones. Indeed, respected papers may be cited in order to shine in their reflectedglory even if they do not seem closely related to the substantive content of thereport.

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    Notes and LettersIt is important to note that an author, in choosing one collection of papersto cite, is not only providing support for his own paper, but is also implicitlydisplaying his allegiance to a particular section of the scientific community13;

    namely, that section which is collectively of the opinion that the cited papersdeserve (affirmative or negational) citation. Moreover, in citing certain papers,the author can be seen to be making an assertion about his own opinionconcerning the validity of the findings of the cited papers, and is thuscontributing, albeit only in small measure, to the overall consensus of his researcharea, a consensus which is also continually being re-established through thechoices of references in his fellow participants' own publications.Certain papers, through their repeated use as authoritative grounds for furtherwork, begin to achieve an exceptional status, and may come to be regarded as'exemplars'14 of valuable work in the field. In some cases, the approaches,techniques and results presented in these exemplary papers may become sowidely known and accepted throughout the field that they no longer need becited explicitly. Their contents become a part of that which every competentmember of the field can be assumed to know. Their findings may be reportedin textbooks and become an ingredient of undergraduate courses, but in thecontext of research, the actual papers may rarely, if ever, be cited, and the detailsof the argument (and sometimes even the author of the paper) may beforgotten.15While these remarks concerning the effectiveness of referring to other papersmay be true for most scientific work, some research papers - those whose primepurpose is to provide a 'blueprint' for the reader to build apparatus or instrumentswhich are intended to perform certain stated functions - do not need to usereferences to help to demonstrate their validity. For this type of paper, theacknowledged test of validity is whether the blueprint, when followed, doesindeed enable the apparatus, instrument, machine or whatever to be successfullyconstructed. Hence we might expect that applied science, technical andengineering articles, many of which are of this type, would have fewer referenceson average than papers drawn from the 'purer' sciences, and this indeed has beenfound to be the case.16

    I remarked above that many references are selected because the author hopesthat the referenced papers will be regarded as authoritative by the intendedaudience. But the identification of a set of authoritative references is not simple.An author cannot be sure who will read his article. Nor can he be certain aboutwhich papers are considered reliable and worthy of citation by those who doconsult his article. He must make informed guesses about these matters and,to the extent that doubt about these guesses remains, the reception that hispaper will receive must be unpredictable.On the reverse side of the coin, readers will often identify papers of interestby examining the works the paper cites. If readers have little respect for thecited articles, or the great majority of the cited works are unknown to them,these facts may bear on their reception of the paper. It is this feature ofreferencing which explains the apparently common (though undocumented)habit of scientists, on coming across an unfamiliar paper, to scan the list ofreferences, and only secondly to examine its contents.In these last few paragraphs, I have been chiefly concerned with the wayin which references are used to provide authoritative grounds to persuade readers

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    Social Studies of Scienceof the validity and significance of the arguments in a paper. But for a paperto be regarded as important, it must not only present true and significant results;there must also be an element of novelty. Often the novelty arises from theuse of new materials (data, theories or techniques) which are assumed to beunfamiliar to the intended audience, although they may be generally knownamong other sections of the scientific community.17 We can therefore expectthat a proportion of the references in some papers will be to articles on subjectswhich lie outside the previous interests or knowledge of the intended audience.

    THE EMPIRICALEVIDENCELet us now consider to what extent the approach to referencing outlined aboveis consistent with some of the empirical research which has used citation analysis.The Coles18 argue that the number of citations a paper receives is a guide to itsquality, and that authors producing high quality papers tend to be more 'visible'to the scientific community and to receive more recognition, more awards andmore prestigious posts than other scientists. In terms of the idea that referencingis an aid to persuasion, the link they have demonstrated between the qualityof a paper and the number of citations it receives can be explained as follows.In order to support their research findings, authors will tend whenever possibleto cite papers which they consider their audience will regard as presenting validand important arguments and tesults. But once a paper has begun to acquiresuch a favourable reputation, it will become particularly valuable as a reference,and hence will be cited more frequently than the average, thus becomingincreasingly visible to a growing audience. The result of this analogue to the'Matthew effect'19 is that the distribution of the number of citations to papersis highly skewed, with a few 'exemplary' papers receiving very high rates ofcitation (until their contents are absorbed into the 'background' knowledge ofthe field) and the great majority getting one or no citations.20Small and Griffith have used an analysis of citations for a quite differentpurpose: to explore the specialty structure of science. They suggest that co-citation (the citation of two documents together by a third)

    identifies relationships between papers which are regarded as importantby authors in the specialty,

    andprovides a natural and quantitative way to group or cluster the citeddocuments21,

    and thus reveals the structure and interrelationships between the research fieldswhich produce these documents. Their method generates 'maps' which seemto have a considerable measure of validity. For instance, they show that thepapers the method places closely together on their 'map' have similar or relatedtitles, while papers with quite unrelated titles are widely separated. Theirtechnique is successful because authors, in choosing references (and thus co-citation pairs) orient to their own perceptions of how the scientific community

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    Notes and Lettersand its knowledge is structured. They place their work within a field by citingresearch which their intended audience values. Thus the co-citation analysisreveals the specialty structure by jointly tapping the individual perceptionsof all the authors whose work has been examined.22The last style of citation analysis I shall consider here is represented by twoarticles, one by Moravcsik and Murugesan, and the other by Chubin and Moitra.Although the methods used by these authors differ in detail, both are essentiallyconcerned to classify references into a number of different types, dependingon the relation of the cited paper to the content of the referring paper. Chubinand Moitra, for example, distinguish four classes of affirmative reference: basic,subsidiary, additional and perfunctory; and two negational: partial and total.23The aim of these classifications is primarily to refine the analysis of citationsfor mapping and for the construction of measures of scientific growth andquality; nevertheless, these authors' empirical studies have yielded observationsof interest in their own right, such as that the 'typical' paper contains fewnegational references but a 'large fraction' of perfunctory references (thenumerical proportions reported in these two articles are 20% and 41%; thediscrepancy arises from the different definitions of 'perfunctory' used by thetwo pairs of authors).These proportions of perfunctory references, those that merely acknowledge'that some other work in the same general area has been performed',24 seempuzzlingly large. Perhaps authors cite such references in the hope of thusincreasing the number of scientists who might recognize one or some of them;and who might therefore be persuaded that the citing paper may be of someinterest or relevance to their own work. While this explanation may accountfor the citation of some references, the large proportions of perfunctoryreferences these analysts report may rather be a product of the methodologythey employ. Their methods of analysis take little or no account of the wayin which research papers are directed towards the interests and knowledge ofa particular audience as they exist at a specific point in time. The analyses assumethat any reader who is reasonably familiar with the literature concerned canrecognize references as instances of one or other of their categories. This, ofcourse, is contrary to the view put forward above that referencing is essentiallya device for persuasion; and that certain references will vary in their powerof persuasion according to the opinions and concerns of those who are to bepersuaded. In particular, their analyses assume that authors, participatingresearchers and competent readerswill share a common reading of the significanceand meaning of references.Let us briefly consider an example to show the inadequacy of theseassumptions. The example is chosen because the details of the case are readilyaccessible; in other respects it can stand as typical of references in general. Thereference I shall consider is to a paper by Gilbert and Woolgar, to be foundin note 6 of Chubin and Moitra's own paper. The note in full reads as follows:

    A distinction between 'references' and 'citations' was introduced byD.J. de S. Price, 'Citation Measuresof Hard Science, Soft Science, Technologyand Non-science', in C. Nelson and D. Pollock (eds), Communication AmongScientists and Engineers (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1970), 3-32, esp. 7,then reiterated by G.N. Gilbert and S. Woolgar, 'The Quantitative Study

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    Social Studies of Scienceof Science: An Examination of the Literature', Science Studies, Vol. 4 (1974),279-94. We relax that distinction until the findings of our analyses arereported.At first, this seems to be an affirmative reference, but one which is notessential to the argument. This suggests that it should be classified as either'additional' ('an independent supportive observation [idea or finding] withwhich the citer agrees'25) or 'perfunctory' ('referred to as related to the reportedresearch without additional comment'26). However, neither category seems

    self-evidently appropriate. Whicheverwe choose, we have to 'bend' the definitionsoffered to accommodate this reference. Now consider the note as a whole. Tworeferences are cited, and the second (the Gilbert and Woolgar paper) is said to'reiterate' a distinction made in the first. Why, then, are both references given?An examination of Gilbert and Woolgar's paper shows that they introduced thedistinction between references and citations without acknowledging Price'spriority. The first sentence of the note could therefore be read as an impliedadmonishment to Gilbert and Woolgar for failing to give credit where it wasdue. Perhaps, then, this was intended to imply criticism, and should be classifiedas 'negational'.Since the intentions of the author are not normally available to the contentanalyst, there seems to be no way of conclusively resolving problems ofclassification such as those encountered in this example. The difficulties aremore compounded when the analyst has only a superficial knowledge of thecontexts in which the papers he examines were written and read. It is unlikely,for instance, that an analyst less familiar with the Gilbert and Woolgar paperthan I am would have realized that the reference might possibly have beennegational. But even when the analyst has all the available knowledge,fundamental problems of interpreting a given reference as an instance of onecategory rather than another remain.27

    CONCLUSIONI have argued for the value of regarding research papers as instruments ofpersuasion, and described how references can be analyzed as aids which increasea paper's power to persuade. But this approach can also be applied moregenerally. For instance, one can examine other techniques which may oftenbe used by scientific authors to persuade their audiences. Another avenue ofenquiry is suggested by the observation that, in general, the outcome ofnegotiations involving efforts at persuasion usually depends not only on theintrinsic quality of the arguments put forward, but also on the parties' relativepower. The study of the effect of power on the construction and evaluation ofscientific knowledge is, however, still in its infancy.28 Thus, implicit in theapproach to a theory of citing I have suggested are a range of empirical andtheoretical problems, most of which await detailed consideration.

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    Notes and Letters

    NOTES

    1. H. Small and B.C. Griffith, 'The Structure of Scientific Literatures, I',Science Studies, Vol. 4 (1974), 17-40; B.C. Griffith et al., 'The Structure ofScientific Literatures, II', Science Studies, Vol. 4 (1974), 339-65;M.J. Moravcsikand P. Murugesan, Some Results on the Function and Quality of Citations',Social Studies of Science, Vol. 5 (1975), 86-92; D.E. Chubin and S. Moitra,'Content Analysis of References: Adjunct or Alternative to Citation Counting?',Social Studies of Science, Vol.5 (1975), 423-41.2. M.J. Mulkay, 'Methodology in the Sociology of Science', Social ScienceInformation, Vol. 13 (1974), 107-19.3. See especially S. Cole and J. Cole, 'Scientific Output and Recognition',American Sociological Review, Vol. 32 (1967), 377-90; but also J.R. Cole andS. Cole, 'Measuring the Quality of Sociological Research: Problems in the Useof the Science Citation Index', American Sociologist, Vol. 6 (1971), 23-29;D. Crane, 'The Academic Marketplace Revisited', American Journal of Sociology,Vol. 75 (1970), 953-64; D. Chubin, 'On the Use of the Science Citation Indexin Sociology', American Sociologist, Vol. 8 (1973), 187-91; and N. Shanin-Cohen,'Innovation and Citation' (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1974), unpublished

    mimeo.4. S. Cole and J.R. Cole, 'Visibility and the Structural Bases of Awarenessof Scientific Research', American Sociological Review, Vol. 33 (1968), 397-413;A. Bayer and J. Folger, 'Some Correlates of a Citation Measure of Productivityin Science', Sociology of Education, Vol. 39 (1966), 381-90; Richard D. Whitley,'Communication Nets in Science', Sociological Review, Vol. 17 (1969), 219-33;and Paul D. Allison and John A. Stewart, 'Productivity Differences amongScientists', American Sociological Review, Vol. 39 (1974), 596-606.5. Small and Griffith, and Griffith et al., ops.cit. note 1.6. Moravcsik and Murugesan, and Chubin and Moitra, ops.cit. note 1.7. N. Kaplan, 'The Norms of Citation Behaviour: Prolegomena to theFootnote', American Documentation, Vol. 16 (1965), 181.8. J.R. Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1971), 256-57.9. Thus Ravetz (ibid.) suggests that cited

    material may be crucial or merely incidental in the argument; itmay have been central to the first formulation of the problem, or merelya late addition; and it may have been used as it was published or requiredextensive reworking.10. G. Nigel Gilbert, 'The Transformation of Research Findings intoScientific Knowledge', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 6, Nos. 3/4 (September1976), 281-306.11. Cf. Kaplan, op.cit. note 7.12. The equivalent effect is obtained by contesting published results whichthe intended audience believe to be false.13. Cf. D. Silverman, Reading Castenada (London: Routledge and

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    Social Studies of Science

    Kegan Paul, 1975), 82-84 et passim.14. Many of these papers may also be regardedas 'exemplars' in the Kuhniansense of the term (see T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn, 1970], 187-91).15. M.J. Moravcsik, 'Measures of Scientific Growth', Research Policy, Vol.2(1973), 269-70. See also the letters on 'Citation Analysis' by S.A. Goudsmitand John D. McGervey, Science, Vol. 183 (11 January 1974), 28-29.16. D.J. de Solla Price, 'Is Technology Historically Independent of Science?',Technology and Culture, Vol. 6 (1965), 553-68.17. Cf. M.J. Mulkay, 'Conformity and Innovation in Science', SociologicalReview Monograph, Vol. 18 (1972), 5-24.18. Cole and Cole, op.cit. note 3.

    19. R.K. Merton, 'The Matthew Effect in Science', Science, Vol. 159 (5January 1968), 56-63.20. The highly skewed distribution of the number of citations among papersis described in D.J. de Solla Price, 'Networks of Scientific Papers', Science,Vol.149 (30 July 1965), 511.21. Small and Griffith, op.cit. note 1, 19.22. Small and Griffith do not point out the rather remarkable fact thatindividual scientists seem to have such compatible perceptions of the structureof science that a single map covering many disciplines can be constructed.23. Chubin and Moitra, op.cit. note 1.24. Moravcsik and Murugesan,op.cit. note 1,91.25. Chubin and Moitra, op.cit. note 1.26. Ibid.

    27. A. Cicourel, Method and Measurement in Sociology (New York: FreePress, 1969), esp. 146-56. These problems of interpretation are recognized,but not avoided, in Chubin and Moitra's paper (cf. op.cit. note 1, 426).28. But see S.B. Barnes, 'Science, Ideology and Pictorial Representation',paper read to the Conference on the Sociology of Science, University of York(16-18 September 1975), unpublished typescript; T. Pinch, 'What does a Proofdo if it does not Prove?' (Department of Sociology, University of Bath, 1976),mimeo; and B. Wynne, 'C.G. Barkla and the J Phenomenon', Social Studiesof Science, Vol. 6, Nos. 3/4 (September 1976), 307-48.

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