Page 340 - Becoming Metric Wise

CHAPTER 11

Timeline of Informetrics

In this chapter, we provide a timeline showing important steps in the his-
tory of scientific communication, publication analysis, citation analysis
and science policy (Hertzel, 1987; de Bellis, 2009).

1665 (5 January): Publication of the first issue of the Journal des Sc¸avans
(Paris), the first ever academic journal, established by Denis de Sallo.
1665 (6 March): Publication of the first issue of the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society (London) under the editorship of
Henry Oldenburg.
1869: Publication of the first issue of the journal Nature (November 4).
1873: Alphonse de Candolle publishes Histoire des Sciences et des
Savants depuis deux Sie `cles, which includes a description of the scientific
strength of countries.
1877: Francis Galton publishes English Men of Science: Their Nature and
Nurture.
1880: Foundation of the journal Science by John Michels with financial
support from Thomas Edison.
1895: Vilfredo Pareto: The first power law, formulated in a context of
income distribution (Pareto, 1895).
1906: J. McKeen Cattell publishes the first edition of American Men of
Science.
1913: Felix Auerbach finds a hyperbolic relationship between the rank
and the size of German cities (what we nowadays call Zipf’s law)
(Auerbach, 1913).
1916: Hyperbolic nature of word use (Zipf’s law): Estoup (1916).
1917: The article “The history of comparative anatomy” by F.J. Cole
and Nellie B. Eales includes publication counts and graphical repre-
sentations (Cole & Eales, 1917).
1922: The term statistical bibliography was introduced by Wyndham
Hulme. These lectures were published 1 year later (Hulme, 1923).
1922: Arnold Dresden’s work on the publications of the Chicago sec-
tion of the American Mathematical Society: a Lotka type presentation
(Dresden, 1922).

Becoming Metric-Wise © 2018 Elsevier Ltd.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102474-4.00011-X All rights reserved. 333