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Obviously bibliographic reference can only go back in time, but just how
far back in time a citing author reaches also tells us something. For
typical journal publications, the typical time scale of references is on
the order of years. A large fraction of this time has been, to date,
sensitive to the production schedules of scientific journals. As the
distance between author's words and reader's browsing has shrunk (e.g.,
in fields like physics where the Los Alamos reprint server has
become a dominant mechanism of dissemination), much of the time now is
due exclusively to delays associated with peer review, revision, etc.
This delay between the time an author is finished with a document and
when it reaches its public obviously provides a lower-bound for
CITATION LAG , the time between a document's publication date and
its' reference by another paper's bibliography.
But independent of
production schedules, there are wide varieties in how far back citations
typically reach. Price sees a deep connection between the social
processes underlying various scientific disciplines. First, he
distinguishes between two gross types of citation, NORMAL AGING
and the IMMEDIACY EFFECT : ``a special hyperactivity of the
rather recent literature'' (p. 164). He defined PRICE'S INDEX to
be the fraction of documents published which are cited {\em within five
years}.
He then goes on to use the width of this research field to
distinguish between ``hard'' and ``soft'' sciences, even
``non-sciences,'' all based on the width of this RESEARCH FRONT
within which most citation is typically made. He sees his Price's Index
as ``corresponding very well with what we intuit as hard science, soft
science and non-science as we descend the scale'' (p. 168). Using
biological metaphors, with different disciplines compared to different
kinds of organisms: Such pathological cases apart, it would seem that
the [Price] index provides a good diagnostic for the extent to which a
subject is attempting, so to speak, to grow from the skin rather than
from the body. With a low index one has a humanistic type of metabolism
which the scholar has to digest all that has gone before, let it mature
gently in the cellar of his wisdom, and then distill forth new words of
wisdom about the same sorts of questions. In hard science the
positiveness of the knowledge and its short term permanence enable one
to move through the packed down past while still a student and then to
emerge at the research front where interaction with one's peers is as
important as the store- house of conventional wisdom. The thinner the
skin of science the more orderly and crysline the growth and the more
rapid the process. (p. 177-178)
He also infers prescriptions from these
statistics for editors of journals who are in a controlling position to
influence a field: I regard the value of this work as being not only
diagnostic, but also prescriptive, so let us look in closing at what
suggestions it makes for the technology of scientific information. At
the personal level of the scientific writer and the editor and publisher
of journals, it tells that one might well be as careful about references
as we are about titles, authorships, and proper presentation of data....
For a research paper it should be exceptional to allow an author to
eschew interaction with col- leagues by citing too few references, and
if he cited too many, perhaps he is writing a review paper rather than a
research con- tribution. Similarly, if you want to make the field firm
and tight and hard and crystalline you have to play with your peers and
keep on the ball by citing their recent work. (p. 178)
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