Why do we need algorithmic historiography?

The editor of this special issue, Chaomei Chen, asked us to provide an applications-oriented view of algorithmic historiography and how it relates to understanding scientific paradigms. The first public presentations of our system for algorithmic historiography were given at the University of Pittsburgh (Garfield, 2001a) and then at Drexel University (Garfield, 2001b). In addition, a paper by the authors has been presented at the national meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (Garfield, Pudovkin, & Istomin, 2002). Of late, it has become fashionable to speak about paradigms, but a paradigm is basically a model of a field. Historiography is intimately related to understanding paradigms shifts. However, we tend to use the term for concepts that are broader in scale than typical literature searches. But if you want to understand how a paradigm has changed, you must identify the literature of the topic first. Then by observing the changes in the citation of key works of that field, you see how the basic concepts or the perception of the paradigm changed. Our historiographic software, hereinafter referred to as HistCiteTM, facilitates the understanding of paradigms by enabling the scholar to identify the significant works on a given topic. At the same time it provides a graphic, geneologic presentation of the citational links between them. The system also preserves these citation links for the entire bibliographic collection so that one can explore intermediary links involving less frequently cited works. The historiography of science can be viewed in a variety of ways. Classical historians of science discuss ancient, medieval, renaissance, and contemporary 19th and 20th century science descriptively. In their narratives and analysis, they also provide extensive bibliographic documentation. Historic scholars are frequently heavy users of library services and usually take great pride in having read both the classical and ancillary, even ephemeral works in the field. In our conception of facilitating historiography—that is, writing the history of modern science—we make the basic assumption that the bibliographic information contained in a collection of published scientific articles is sufficient for the purpose of recapturing the historiographic structure of the field. Because citation indexes utilize the cited works of thousands of authors, it is assumed that collectively they call out the basic works in any field. Gaps may exist in the documentation provided by individual authors, but collectively they produce a fairly complete picture of the historic background of the topic. Our approach to historiography is decidedly genealogic. We want to show where a particular topic began and identify both the bibliographic antecedents and descendents of its principal, often primordial papers and authors. Once these basic structural elements (papers and books) of the field are identified, they are “summarized” graphically as an © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.