Page 341 - Becoming Metric Wise

334 Becoming Metric-Wise

1925: G. Udny Yule proposes the process named (afterward) after him
and which is the basis for the explanation of the informetric laws
(Yule, 1925).
1926: Alfred Lotka writes “Frequency distribution of scientific
productivity” in which his famous law was formulated (Lotka, 1926).
1927: First article using citation analysis (Gross & Gross, 1927).
1928: Hyperbolic nature of word use (Condon, 1928).
1932: Selected studies of the principle of relative frequency by George
K. Zipf. This book includes a size-frequency study of Chinese words
(Zipf, 1932).
1934: Samuel C. Bradford publishes “Sources of information on
specific subjects” about the scattering of the literature on a topic, later
referred to as Bradford’s law (Bradford, 1934).
1934: Paul Otlet uses the term “bibliome ´trie” in his Traite ´ de
Documentation (Otlet, 1934).
1935: Publication of “The psychobiology of language.” This book
contains the first clear formulation of “Zipf’s law” by Zipf himself,
(Zipf, 1935).
1936: The first journal-to-journal cross-citation network (psychologi-
cal journals) presented by Hulsey Cason & Marcella Lubotsky
(Cason & Lubotsky, 1936).
1939: John Desmond Bernal published “The Social Function of
Science” the earliest text on the sociology of science (Bernal, 1939).
1945: Vannevar Bush publishes “As we may think,” a visionary text
anticipating the information society, including the idea of a memex
(sometimes seen as a precursor of the Internet) that would transform
the information explosion into a knowledge explosion (Bush, 1945a).
1945: Vannevar Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier marking the begin-
ning of modern science policy (Bush, 1945b).
1948: Samuel Bradford publishes his main book: Documentation
(Bradford, 1948).
1948: Claude Shannon publishes his mathematical theory of commu-
nication (Shannon, 1948a,b).
1948: The term librametrics is proposed by S.R. Ranganathan (but not
published).
1949: Study of the characteristics of the literature of chemistry and
physics; use of “key journals” by Herman Fussler (Fussler, 1949).
1949: George K. Zipf published his book Human Behavior and the
Principle of Least Effort which summarizes his main ideas (Zipf, 1949).