Studies in Scientometrics I Transience and Continuance in Scientific Authorship

Investigation of the transience / continuance phenomenon occurring at a research front. The annual output of authors in a random sample derived from seven years data from Science Citation Index and Who is publishing in Science was analysed. In the whole period (1964-1970) there are 281 transient authors and 19 continuant authors, for a total population of 506 authors. By deriving a quantitative model for the author flow pattern analysis, it was shown that there is a birth rate (annual recruitment) and a death rate (annual termination) which overlap to give an infant mortality (transience). By refining the model, it was possible to define a core of continuant authors, which amounts to 20% of those publishing. The transient authors constitute 22% of the annual population and 2/3 of the newcomers to publication. The other identified components of a scientific community are the recruits, terminators, non-core publishing continuants and non-publishing continuants. These demographic properties are clearly associated with the lowest and highest rates of authors' productivity, the distributions of which folkw Lotka's and Price's laws with great regularity. Thus it was possible to derive a lifetime expectancy at the research front which will be proportional to the time of active publication. On one end of the scale there is a majority of authors with a minimum life expectancy and a low average productivity (75% of the authors produce 25% of the papers); at the opposite extreme there are authors in the permanent nucleus (20%) with less average mortality and greater average productivity (more than half of the papers) All this is a result of the positive feedback or Mathew Principle in scientific publication. This situation seems so intrinsic that it must be regarded at the way in which society has adjusted its institutional structure to fit the cloth of scientific productivity and demography. Many of the richest areas for research in the sociology of science depend upon some understanding of what may be called the actuarial statistics of the scientific community. One needs to know the dynamical processes which govern emergence, survival and disappearance within that community. These determine the structure of the group by age, status, productivity, reputation and professional ties. Such studies have many of the same strengths and limitations as acturial methods in demography and life insurance. Useful calculations may be made about the population in the large, but the bearing of the life of any individual remains statistical rather than causal. The purpose of this investigation is to uncover the facts and regularities which will require some theoretical explanation. Undoubtedly the most important phenomenon, hitherto not well recognized, is that at any given time a large number of those working at the research front are transients_whose_names have never appeared before and will not appear again in the record. The point has obvious application to the natural history of scientific careers, and it is also of fundamental importance to the analysis of manpower data in the sciences, since only part of the research labor force can be considered as stable. Previous work in this areas has usually been based upon hand or machine counts that have been limited to a single nation, a scientific specialty, or just one journal or scientific institution. The results have always been of questionable generality because of possible strong idiosyncracies of these special groups and also because of the large general movement that exists across the boundaries of such groups as people change jobs and migrate through fields. We have been fortunate in having at our disposal data emerging as a by-product from the machine handling of a uniquely comprehensive and worldwide coverage of the literature in all fields of basic and applied science. For this reason the results are relatively free of local idiosyncracies and are of general applicability to the scientific community. Ci. Inf., Rio de Janeiro, 4(1):27-40, 1975 27 DEREK DE SOLLA PRICE & SUHA GÜRSEY The data bank for this study was based upon volumes published by the Institute for Scientific Information, including several years of output of the Science Citation Index, with its indexes of Source Authors and Cited Authors, and the annual volumes of Who is Publishing, in Science which is derived from the weekly editions of Current