Derek DeSolla Price

Derek DeSolla Price (1922-1983) was an English American historian of science.

Life

Derek John DeSolla Price was born on January 22, 1922 in Leyton, a suburb of London. He earned a B.A. with honors in physics and mathematics from the University of London in 1942, then worked on wartime research projects. He received a PhD in experimental physics at the University of London in 1946. In 1948, Price began teaching at Raffles College, which became part of the National University of Singapore. There he read a set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and became aware of the evolutionary nature and the historical aspects of science and technology. He also developed his theory of the exponential growth of scientific literature.

Price returned to England and obtained a second doctorate, in the history of science, from Cambridge University in 1954. He worked at Princeton and the Smithsonian Institution before he secured a professorship at Yale University. In 1961 he was named chair of a new Department of History of Science and Medicine.

In the prospectus for the new department, Price elaborated on the exponential growth of scientific literature and tied it to the increased number of indexing and abstracting services. "He also predicted or advanced the notion of relating fields of scholarly activity via interactive communication patterns. He suggested that...relationships within and among disciplinary literatures can be identified and measured via their mode and degree of citation to one another. ...Price was the father (certainly one of the fathers) of what is now known and pursued as bibliometrics." (DALB, Supp.Vol. p.100)

In a posthumous, expanded version of Price's 1963 book Little Science, Big Science [titled Little Science, Big Science ... and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), Eugene Garfield and Robert Merton lauded Price: "we can hardly doubt that with this book and the papers which followed it ... Derek John De Solla Price takes his place as the father of Scientometrics." [scientometrics is bibliometrics applied to scientific literature].

Derek Price died in September 1983.

Contributions

Price was the founding chair of a new department of the histories of science, technology, and medicine at Yale in 1961. He is generally regarded as a major contributor to bibliometrics, scientometrics, and the popularization of the history of science.

Publications

For a full list his publications and some unpublished papers see Yagi, Badash, & Beaver (1966, 76-83). The Wikipedia lists numerous publications. [1]

Heavenly clockwork : the great astronomical clocks of medieval China. With Joseph Needham & Wang Ling. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1960.
Science since Babylon New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961. A prospectus for the new department at Yale and for his personal goals in the history of science.
"Networks of Scientific Papers." Science 149 (July 30, 1965): 510-515. Reprinted in Kochen, The Growth of Knowledge. Huntington, NY: R.E. Krieger (Wiley), 1967.
Little Science, Big Science (1963). A set of lectures on the "science of science."
JASIS, 27(5); 1976. RE: cumulative advantage processes (Kochen says these became permanent and central topics after this article)

Awards

Society for Social Studies of Science. J. D. Bernal Award, 1981.

The journal Scientometrics International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics confers the Derek John de Solla Price Medal.

Offices

Papers

Price's library and papers were deposited at the Musée National des Sciences, des Techniques, et des Industries, Paris, France.
Adler Planetarium, Chicago, IL. Derek J. de Solla Price Papers. [3]