Scientometrics by Hand

The Ups and Downs of Scientometrics in Russia

Paul Wouters mailto:pwouters@xs4all.nl

Department of Science and Technology Dynamics http://www.chem.uva.nl/sts/

University of Amsterdam http://www.uva.nl

Nieuwe Achtergracht 166

1018 WV Amsterdam The Netherlands

phone: 3120 5256595; fax: 3120 5256597

email: pwouters@xs4all.nl mailto:pwouters@xs4all.nl

10 March 1998

Introduction

The story of Russian scientometrics is an intriguing one. It tells as much about the nature of scientometrics and its relationships with science policy, as about Russian science and science policy in general. In this presentation I will try to address the main features of Russian and Ukrainian scientometrics and give a preliminary answer to the question why socialist scientometrics was a failure. At first sight this seems rather counter-intuitive. After all, the attraction scientometrics has on science policy often resides in the promise of a more rational policy. It is the seduction of "objective indicators". In what country would one expect at least a serious attempt to mobilize scientometrics for science policy, if not in the country with the most comprehensive policy planning cycle in the world? Well, the truth is that not even this attempt was made. In a series of interviews we have tried to discover how scientometrics developed in the context of a socialist planned economy, what type of scientometrics was practised and what the actors themselves thought about the results. In the title of this presentation, I have tried to capture the feature all Russian and Ukrainian scientometrics shares: it was mainly done by hand. The virtual absence of computers forced everybody to collect the citation data and process them manually.

Topics of discussion

In this presentation, I will first dwell on the early history of Russian science studies and the introduction of scientometrics. In fact, science studies in general and scientometrics in particular owe a lot to Russian scientists. The drama of this story is that the country which hosted the first course and institution on the history of science and technology, and which later provoked the interest in this topic of outstanding scientists like Desmond Bernal - whose writing influenced amongst others the creators of the Science Citation Index Eugene Garfield and Joshua Lederberg - on its own soil had to witness the demise of social science in general and of science studies and scientometrics in particular.

While in the beginning of this century the Russians were far ahead of the West in this field, in the sixties they had to re-import what they had first exported themselves. Then, I will discuss specific determining features: the specific philosophical attitude towards science which differs from the usual pespectives in Western Europe, the lack of accessible databanks and of computers, the strong orientation of all scientometricians to information science and mathematics, the conclusion that actually one can hardly speak of one Russian scientometrics but should distinguish two different groups, and finally the conclusion that we did not discover any impact of scientometrics on Russian or Ukrainian science policy.

Pioneering

The geochemist and polymath Vladimir Vernadskii started a tradition of teaching and research on the history of science in 1893. In 1902 he gave a first course on "the history of the modern scientific world view" at the Moscow University. After 1917 he actively campaigned for an institution. This led to the first institute on the history of science and technology in the world: the Academy of Science Commission on the History of Knowledge" in 1921. According to the historian Graham (Graham 1993), who I am following here, he was convinced to live in the era of a third scientific revolution, the advent of relativity theory and quantum theory. History should be a form of self-study of science to improve the impact of these historic developments.

In the same period, a related movement developed in Poland (Krauze et al., 1977). As early as 1923, the leading Polish journal Nauka Polska proclaimed a new field: the knowledge of science. It was an active movement, leading to a specialist journal Organon, and it is striking how modern the aims and views of those philosophers of science seem now. Characterized by high expectations of science, strong need of reflexive application of science to itself, strong bond between science, history and philosophy, policy oriented nature of science studies, yet no narrow instrumental vision of this relationship. This movement wished to combine epistemological concerns with anthropological means. It ended suddenly in 1938 with the attack of the Nazi’s on Poland.

Naukovedenie

After 1929, when the Academy of Science was taken over by the Russian communist party, Bukharin became head of the institute (1930). He was one of the principal leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution. The progressive liberal tradition among Russian intelligentsia was incorporated in the marxist tradition in which science and technology were of prime importance (Marx). Bukharin was relatively liberal as well: none of his section heads were communists. His view of science was actually a rather sophisticated form of social constructivism. This might not have been very important for us, were it not for the accidental coincidence of the History of Science Congress in London in 1931 with the wish of Stalin to demonstrate his willingness to cooperate with "bourgois intellectuals" (Werskey, 1978). Hastily a top delegation of Russian scientists lead by Bukharin was sent to London. The physicist Boris Hessen was among them, and he delivered a speech that caused a sensation among historians of science (Goldsmith & Mackay, 1964). At the time, Newton was God. Hessen put him down to earth by stressing the social relationships shaping Newtonian physics. Inspired John Desmond Bernal to write the Social Function of Science, which in its turn heavily influenced tremendous amount of scientists, Garfield and Lederberg. Science studies was effectively exported, though in its marxist form. Just in time: Stalinist purges effectively killed all social science.

Naukometria

Mikulinsky, Deputy Director of the Institute of the History of Science and Technology of the Academy of Science in Moscow, was an ardent suporter of the new "naukovedeniye" and thought that Russia lagged behind in science studies. The main proponents of quantitative studies were, however, G. Dobrov in the Ukraine and V. Nalimov in Moscow. They were two very different persons. Dobrov, who was the first to publish a book in the science of science in the SU (Dobrov, 1966), was a party man whereas Nalimov had been prisoner in the Gulag. Dobrov created an active and international network and consistently promoted his style of science studies. Nalimov quickly lost interest after a series of intensive seminars and did not actively promote his own visibility. He rather pursued very abstract philosphy of language and science. For Dobrov science studies was instrumental and closely connected to science policy. For Nalimov science was a self-organizing system and he distrusted politics and politicians. Science studies should improve self-understanding of science, not some instrumental goal. Nalimov stressed the need of an open scientific system, whereas Dobrov seems to have functioned pretty well in the closed shop system of scientific institutions in the SU.

Both were steeped in information science, but in a different way. Dobrov: cybernetics. Nalimov: probabilistic statistics. The two different biographies correlate, though not in a causal way, with two different brands of scientometrics. From the sixties onwards, there was no longer one type of quantitative science studies in the SU, there existed two competing styles. As I will try to defend later, this is no coincidence.

The Moscow branch

Born in a professors family in Moscow, Nalimov worked extensively in technology, both before, during and after his exile. He got the feel of uncertainty in measurement and applied in a probabilistic theory of experiment. It originated from the understanding that experimental results are always uncertain, and that minimizing this uncertainty is different from the vain attempt to eradicate them. His book on chemical analysis earned him a position at the Moscow Institute of Rare Metals in 1960.

Before that, however, he had already become familiar with Derek Price’s work, at VINITI’S abstracting service of foreign articles. He liked the article and wrote a cybernetic article with the formulas for Price’s curves (Nalimov, 1966). He and his coauthors were reprimanded. He could follow up on it after he got his position at the Moscow Institute of Rare Metals MSU. In 1966 he received the first Science Citation Index and immediately started to work with it. The first informal seminar on citation analysis happened to consist mostly of chemists. The work was divided: the chemist Orient had analytical chemistry, Granovsky organic chemistry and so on. All by hand, of course. And in their free time! It led to a large publication in 1967, one collective summing up of a year’s work. Its conclusion: "Soviet science had little impact on world science, the information flows were isolated". Not a very welcome conclusion.

Yet, the seminar became famous, and moved to the Institute of the History of Science and Technology IHST. Two years later, Nalimov published his book Scientometrics: Studying science as an information process (Nalimov & Multchenko, 1969), and presented his conclusions to the Dokumentalistika conference as a new task of documentation science. This group later dissolved when Nalimov became more interested in philosphical issues as such. It was moreover an individualist approach after all. In this respect the simultanous invention of the co-citation method by the American Henry Small and the Russian Irina Marshakova is telling: whereas Small was a member of the ISI collective building and extending the Science Citation Index, Marshakova was working alone without the help of computers. Nalimov’s scientometrics is captured in the following quote:

The Kiev branch

Dobrov, born in the Donetsk Bassin, was interested in the history of technology from the very beginning. He became an active and rather succesful Komsomal member. Regional secretary, then back to academic research (not very usual). Became head of the deptartment of history of technology, and created the "Lab of Computer Methods of Processing Information on the History of Science". Quantitative methods in social science were popular at that time, related to the fame of cybernetics. He disagreed with Derek Price on the levelling off of the exponential growth curves, arguing that computers would enable a continuing rise of productivity in science. He also thought, by the way, that the SU would become the centre of world science.

Dobrov’s approach stressed the revealing of regularities in the development of science (like Price had done) and saw this as the basis for evaluating and regulating scientific and technological activity,and preparing and informing science policy. It was very policy oriented. After 1968, forecasting became an important political topic in the SU and Dobrov had time serial data. He moved into the field of forecasting in the Ukraine: he led the "Division of the Complex Problems of Naukovedeniye" of the Council for Studying the Productive Forces, which became part of the Institute of Cybernetics of the Academy of Science in the Ukraine in 1971. An important scientometric endeavour was the building of ISTOK, the information system of thematic orientation and classification. Central technique: the co-request method, adapted from Marshakova’s cocitation.

Differences

To sum up: the differences between the two scientometric schools in the former SU related to the concept of science, the audience of the scientometricians, the objects they used, the way they organized their research and their personal scientific style (see slide).

Conclusion

Thus, whereas the Russian scientists had a pioneering role with respect to science studies, the Stalinist suppression of social science led to it lagging behind. The country had to re-import a new tradition of reflexive science studies. Given the fact that the representation scientometrics creates of science does in itself have no intrinsic meaning (it has to be interpreted in a qualitative way) (Wouters, 1998), the succesful development of scientometrics needs a discourse in which it can get this meaning. It has to be linked to some qualitative science representation. In terms of human actors: scientometricians need a non-scientometric audience. Two possibilities were available in the Soviet situation: scientists or policy officials. Both varieties emerged, in the form of two different schools of scientometrics. But neither of the two led to a rational science policy.

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