From the science of science to Scientometrics visualizing the history of science with HistCite software

While ISSI was founded in 1993, scientometrics and bibliometrics are now at least half a century old. Indeed, the field can be traced to early quantitative studies in the early 20 Century. In the thirties, it evolved to the “science of science.” The publication of J. D. Bernal’s Social Function of Science in 1939 was a key transition point but the field lay dormant until after World War II, when DJD Price’s books Science Since Babylon and Little Science, Big Science were published in1961 and 1963. His role as the “father of scientometrics” is clearly evident by using the HistCite software to visualize his impact as well as the subsequent impact of the journal Scientometrics on the growth of the field. Scientometrics owes its name to V. V. Nalimov, the author of Naukometriya, and to Tibor Braun who adapted the neologism for the journal. The primordial paper on citation indexing by Garfield which appeared in Science 1955 became a bridge between Bernal and Price. The timeline for the evolution of scientometrics is demonstrated by a HistCite tabulation of the ranked citation index of the 100,000 references cited in the 3,000 papers citing Price.