Page 29 - Becoming Metric Wise

18 Becoming Metric-Wise

so-called general relativity theory to include gravity. Einstein was guided
to his investigations by the observed inconsistency of Newtonian mechan-
ics with Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. Hence his theory was
a response to some unexplained facts. Solutions to important challenges
may lead to paradigm shifts in the sense of Kuhn (1962).
Finally, a discovery may fall into the “Chance” category. Such discov-
eries are, however, not pure luck but “favor the prepared mind.” Chance
discoveries may also be said to be the result of a serendipitous finding.
A well-known example belonging to this category is Fleming’s discovery
of penicillin.
Koshland stressed the fact that often the discoverer needs not one but
a number of original discoveries until the discovery is complete. He fur-
ther wrote that the cha-cha-cha theory is not only applicable to big dis-
coveries, but also to small everyday findings. This encouraged us
(Rousseau, 2007b) to see whether we could apply the cha-cha-cha theory
to some findings in informetrics. We consider the application of an exist-
ing theory, concept or tool to a new situation as a “charge” discovery, as
it means taking a (small) step that no one else has taken before. Our field
is an applied field, hence for this reason most of our field’s “discoveries”
will fall into the “Charge” group. If someone just collects data and tries
to find out which statistical distribution fits best, we consider this a
“Chance” discovery, in particular if the resulting distribution turns out to
be interesting and is confirmed later.
We next present some examples of discoveries in the information
sciences and their corresponding cha-cha-cha category. The topics men-
tioned in these examples are discussed further on in this book.
• Problem: information retrieval across scientific disciplines;
Discovery: Science Citation Index (SCI) (see Section 5.2);
Discoverer: Garfield (1963);
Category of discovery: charge (as the idea of a citation index existed
already).
• Problem: evaluation of journals without the use of (subjective) peer
review;
Discovery: the journal impact factor;
Discoverers: Garfield and Sher (1963), but based on ideas by others;
see (Archambault & Larivie `re, 2007);
Category of discovery: charge.
• Problem: finding a simple way for the evaluation of an individual
scientist;