The great scientific acceleration: Scientometrics and time-binding techniques 1950–1980

Abstract

This article examines discourse on science citations and information between 1950 and 1980. Drawing upon the works of Eugene Garfield, John Desmond Bernal, and Derek de Solla Price, it explores how the scientific publication became a locus for shaping temporalities. Narratives and visual representations were “time-binding techniques,” which captured, arranged, and displayed temporalities. Past, present, and future were not merely sequential but intricately interwoven. It gave rise to ambivalent notions of both progress and potential hazards of unchecked scientific growth. Furthermore, the article underscores how time-binding techniques had both ontological and policy effects. They defined a place of contemporary society within a chronological flow of time. These accounts also generated calls for rational science policies and stewardship of science amidst what was perceived as an ongoing information explosion. By synthesizing research on historical time and history of postwar science policies, the article contributes to an understanding of temporalities emerging from the sciences in the postwar era.

In 1955, American information scientist Eugene Garfield proposed a Science Citation Index to the National Science Foundation and to the readers of Nature. The index was baptized by Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg and Garfield suggested that it would contain all relevant information about citations in science. It provided an alphabetical list, assigning serial number to periodicals and individual articles, as well as numbers for articles referencing the publication in question (Cawkell and Garfield, 2001: 152; Garfield, 1955: 109).

Garfield's index was part of the emerging scholarly field “scientometrics,” which aimed to quantitatively calculate research. The term itself was coined by the Russian Vassily Nalimov in 1969, yet efforts have been underway since at least the 1940s. Actors in what would become scientometrics measured the number of scholars or scientific publications, and these methods placed them within a discourse on a “science of science,” “science information,” or “information science” (Garfield, 1977b: 32; Hood and Wilson, 2001: 291–293; Kragh, 1987: 184–185; Paoloni, 2017: 179; Price, 1978: v–ix). There was, in the words of historian Paul Wouters, a “citation culture” in the 1950s and 1960s in which the nature and growth of scholarly information were increasingly debated (Wouters, 1999: 2).

Influential actors in this discussion included Eugene Garfield, John Desmond Bernal, and Derek de Solla Price. Garfield started out as a chemist at Columbia University, and in 1960 he founded a commercial company, the Institute for Scientific Information, which was responsible for collecting data on publications and publishing the Science Citation Index. Bernal was a professor of physics at the University of London and explored relations between science, society, and human history in books like The Social Function of Science (1939) and Science in History (1954). Price, a professor in the history of science at Yale, is often referred to as “the father of scientometrics,” mainly because of his influential books Science Since Babylon (1961) and Little Science, Big Science (1963) (Garfield, 1985: 501, 2009: 173–174; Leydesdorff and Milojevic, 2015: 322; Yagi et al., 1996: 64).

In 1962, Eugene Garfield explained that all scientists produced, stored, and disseminated information. Being a competent scientist meant being an efficient handler of data.

Furthermore, multiple actors at the time spoke of an “information explosion” (Garfield, 1977a: 2, 1977b: 318; Green, 1964: 646; Price, 1964: 655). According to John C. Green, in the short period of 1957–1963, the number of scientific articles had doubled, from 437,000 to 950,000 titles (Green, 1964: 647–648). Accounts of increasing publications contributed to a postwar conversation in the Western World on the increasing size and impact of science, including ramifications of increased funding and a growing scientific work force.

In the following, I argue that discourse on scientific citations and information shaped temporalities, that is, descriptions of past, present, and future, as well as conceptions of epochs, directions of historical developments, and the rhythms of scientific and societal change. I employ the concept time-binding techniques to indicate how temporalities were produced, arranged, and displayed within the discourse on scientific citations and information. In these accounts, past, present, and future were deeply interconnected. The past explained the present and future, yet prognostications and descriptions of the contemporary situation reciprocally shaped understandings of the past. Furthermore, this discourse generated ambivalent notions of progress and acceleration, along with concerns about the threats posed by unchecked scientific growth.

Scholars like Reinhart Koselleck, Fracois Hartog, and Aleida Assmann have suggested that, in the “time regime” of modernity, the past was separated from the present and the future. A breaking away from the past emerged as the future was described as malleable and human history moving forward, with “progress” as a coherent narrative. This fiction of beginnings ushered in an invention of history writing as a means to illuminate the differences between past and present. The writing of history allegedly became a backward-looking practice, detached from future looking discourse (Assmann, 2020: 10–13, 54–55 and 93–97; Hartog, 2015; Koselleck, 2004: 246 and 255–276).

While actors in scientometrics produced temporal ideas similar to modern time-thinking—for instance portraying time as a measurable flow and emphasizing the present as a particularly important period—their arguments revealed more complex relationships within historical time. They were intensely interested in the history of science, often highlighting its importance. Perceived gaps between past and present were not readily present. Instead, the relation between them was often understood as a dialectic interaction of change and continuity. Moreover, discourse on progress and future portrayed both promises and caution, and proponents of scientometrics vigorously argued that the growth of science should and could be regulated.

Because the model of a time regime of modernity tends to obscure such complexities, I build instead on scholarship that emphasizes multiple temporalities (Fareld, 2021; Hsiang et al., 2023; Simon and Tamm, 2023: 2; Tamm and Olivier, 2019). According to Zoltàn Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm, the idea of multiple temporalities has become a shared conviction among many scholars investigating historical time. Consequently, they argue that research should move on to show how conflicts and temporal multitudes actually play out and clash in different contexts (Simon and Tamm, 2023: 9 and 45). I take up this challenge by showing how discourse on science citations and information revealed a balancing act between history, present and future, as well as between different rhythms and directions of historical time.

My second argument is that time-binding techniques also generated ideas about science policies. In particular, the scientific publication became a focal point where temporalities and a perceived need for science policies converged. Precisely because the actors created descriptions of ambivalent pasts, presents and futures they argued that their moment in history warranted stewardship of scholarly research. Questions about scientific publications, citations, and information gave rise to ideas to measure and control science, rather than simply letting it loose. The scientific publication thus became a locus for shaping temporalities through debates about its proliferation, weaknesses, and effects on knowledge production and ultimately on the timescales of society.

Consequently, my arguments resonate with research on the history of postwar science policies. In the 1930s, key features of modern scholarship were in place, including research universities, career tracks, peer reviews, and a circulation of publications. However, as described in existing research, the unprecedented mobilization of scientific research during World War II created postwar science policies in Europe and the US. In the 20 years period from the war to the late 1960s, there emerged what David Guston has called a new “social contract” between government and science (Guston, 2000). Daniel Greenberg has called the process a “marriage between science and state.” The agreement generated governmental patronage to facilitate knowledge, with expectations that basic research would lead to technological developments (Elzinga and Jamison, 1995; Ezrahi, 2015: 212; Greenberg, 1999: 51–57; Hallonsten, 2016: 43–49). Moreover, historical research has described a rapid expansion of science in terms of investments and the influx of scholars. In the US, funding from the federal government quadrupled between 1950 and 1965. The process has been captured through investigations into “big science”—the term itself was established by the early 1960s—meaning growing research organizations (Lewenstein, 103–105, 110 and 137; Hallonsten, 4–9, 17–19 and 49; Capshew and Rader, 3; Jasanoff, 2005). Studies of postwar science policies have also investigated “a sociology of expectation” where outlooks on the future were a repeated rhetorical theme. Influential actors shaping science policies argued that science was a dynamic force, and optimism about creating national prosperity through academic knowledge became dominant (Brown et al., 2000; Widmalm and Tunlid, 2016).

In the following, I aim to synthesize research on historical time and history of postwar science policies. The latter has not delved deeply into complex perceptions of history, present and future, beyond beliefs in progress. Conversely, research on historical time has often returned to innovation, dynamism and an accelerating modern culture as driven by, and coveted in, the sciences. Without empirically rich investigations, scientific knowledge has been generally viewed as the most future directed discourse in modernity (Assmann, 2020: 10, 54–55, 93–97 and 135–136). However, much remains to be said about temporalities emerging from within the sciences themselves.

Time-binding techniques: Where is historical time?

Previous scholarship has sporadically attempted to examine how time-binding shapes notions of time through cultural processes. Writing in the 1920s and 1930s, anthropologist Alfred Korzybski formulated a theory of humanity, asserting that humans are the only species capable of time-binding. Culture consists of mechanisms that “summarize, digest and appropriate” past experiences, thereby creating a learning process for humankind. Timebinding in this context became a method for collecting experiences, with each generation contributing to material and spiritual wealth inherited from their predecessors. Civilization, Korzybski explained, was thus a process of binding time (Montagu, 1953: 149–150). Arlie Hochschild's work, “the time bind” is a process of modern work life which reverses relations between work and home. In her analysis, home and private life, rather than spaces of work, become a place of stress and unpredictable temporal structures (Hochschild, 1997).

Korzybski's full-fledged theory of civilization and Hochschild's sociological critique of late modern life diverge significantly from the meaning of time-binding that I intend to elaborate. Here, I use time-binding techniques to refer to the ways in which time was represented and temporalities constructed in varying forms of media. In the 1970s, Harold Innis argued that media like stone tablets or hand-copied manuscripts on parchment are time binding because they are stable enough to carry meaning over different periods and show the passing of time (Innis, 1972). In the edited volume Times of History, Times of Nature I developed the idea of time-binding techniques together with Anders Ekström. In our adaptation of Innis’ idea, time-binding techniques are operations, concepts or symbols that make time comprehensible (Bergwik and Ekström, 2022).

In a recent overview of temporality studies, Zoltán Boldizsàr Simon and Marek Tamm pose the question “where is historical time” (Simon and Tamm, 2023: 3). My focus on time-binding techniques answers the question by aligning with Matthew Champion's emphasis on “the performance of time across various media” (Champion, 2019: 254). In this case, temporalities emerged through documents, concepts, graphs, and images, and the operations used to create them. Bernal's, Price's, and Garfield's time-binding techniques, I contend, were genres like history writing, terms like “acceleration” and images like diagrams. These tools served to describe and arrange the frames, directions, and durations of multiple temporalities. Timebinding techniques managed, envisioned, and arranged temporalities in the discourse on scientometrics and science information.

This analytical apparatus is connected to broader discussions in temporality studies. First, and more generally, it resonates with the argument summarized by Henning Trüper, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who contend that temporalities are cultural products constituted by “practical and discursive devices” and reliant on texts in a “variety of genres” (Trüper et al., 2015: 12). Similarly, research on “pictorial temporalities” argues that pictures not only represent time but also actively shape perceptions of it (Grave, 2019: 117; Hochkirchen, 2021: 102–103; Simon and Tamm, 2023: 36).

Second, time-binding techniques intersect with discussions about “synchronization.” According to Helge Jordheim, synchronization refers to conceptual practices in historical sources that compare and adapt multiple times. Through the idea of time-binding techniques, I offer a way of investigating what Jordheim has described as ways of structuring and synchronizing times in the face of multiple temporalities (Jordheim, 2014). Compared to synchronization, time-binding techniques as an analytical concept provide a clearer focus on the acts and consequences of writing down timescales in words, images, and documents.

Furthermore, the idea of time-binding techniques resonates with theories about “cultural techniques,” as developed in German media studies. Cultural techniques are operations—such as counting, writing, and drawing—that underpin cultural discourse and technological innovation. For example, counting preceded numerical systems and image-making predated genres of painting (Krämer and Bredekamp, 2013: 20–29; Siegert, 2015: 2 and 10–11; Winthrop Young, 2013: 9).

Thomas Macho has argued that time measurement itself is a fundamental cultural technique, suggesting that exploring time entails studying clocks, calendars, history writing, periodizations, or chronologies. As a cultural technique, time-keeping generates frames of reference for understanding time in the abstract (Macho, 2003). A common pattern in time keeping as a cultural technique is the production of surfaces of inscription. As Sibylle Krämer observes, “we do not merely think WITH paper; we think ON paper” (Krämer, 2014: 5; Siegert, 2011: 13). In this case, these inscriptions are dense words like “history,” “growth,” and “limits,” or graphics and diagrams like arrows and curves displaying periods or directions of time. As Boris Jardine notes, paper tools shape worlds in the history of science. They serve as material for inscriptions, as well as vehicles for recording, ordering, and sorting information (Jardine, 2017: 53–58).

Importantly, I build on this research on cultural techniques to demonstrate how time-binding techniques created ontological, epistemological, and political effects. As Macho argues, time measurement does not presuppose ontological or metaphysical notions about time. Instead, as operations, cultural techniques generate ideas that influence and shape cultural practices (Krämer and Bredekamp, 2013: 27; Macho, 2003; Siegert, 2015: 9–14; Winthrop Young, 2013: 7–8). Similarly, Cornelia Vismann contends that drawing a line in the ground over time produces sovereigns and subjects rather than the reverse (Vismann, 2013: 83–93). In this case, I focus on how efforts to institutionally organize knowledge were deeply affected by perceptions of past, present, and future. Policies to manage research and steer science were rooted in temporalities.

Citations and developments in science

Eugene Garfield, JD Bernal, and Derek Price inspired each other's work. Bernal met Garfield at the International Conference on Scientific Information in Washington in 1958 and they started to correspond in 1962. Two years later, Bernal agreed to serve on the advisory board of the Science Citation Index. Derek Price joined Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information, and from 1963, they served together on the Science Information Council of the National Science Foundation (Cawkell and Garfield, 2001: 149 and 153; Garfield, 1983: 511; Mackay, 1984: 318; Paoloni, 2017: 181; Yagi et al., 1996: 68). In Science Since Babylon (1961) and Little Science, Big Science (1963), Derek Price underscored quantitative modeling in comprehending science. He acknowledged that Bernal had prepared his mind, yet Price himself has also been described as a pioneer in bringing together the history of science and information science. Little Science, Big Science has been characterized as “the most important work in the history of scientometrics” (Garfield, 2007: 3–5, 1985: 487; Kinouchi, 2014: 150; Price, 1963: 4, 1965a: 233; Yagi et al. 1996: 64).

The three actors were thus part of a network of shared concerns, and united through an interest in scientific publications and citations. Moreover, they joined in the belief that citations could be a base for understanding the nature of research. Nevertheless, their respective focus and interests also diverged. Bernal was a historian and science policy activist rather than a practicing scientometrician. Garfield on the other hand did not write synthesizing histories. He had a vested interests in launching and maintaining his own index and institute. In his case, notions about science information and citations were often turned into a sales pitch for the citation index, and Garfield repeatedly claimed that it could create an impression of the “impact factor,” and shape a “reward system for science” (Garfield, 1964: 653). Among the three, Derek Price most ambitiously straddled history writing, sociology of science, and scientometrics. Indeed, he used bibliographic methods to write both historical accounts and sociological analyses of postwar scientific research.

The differences aside, all three viewed the scholarly publication as a focal point for comprehending scientific knowledge. Garfield insisted that papers were the chief product of scholarly work, and a scientist was someone who wrote them (Garfield, 1964: 649, 1979: 81). Price returned throughout his career to how the evolution of scientific fields could be analyzed through publications, maintaining that science was “papyrocentric” (Kragh, 1987: 185).

The discourse on scientific information and the promises of measuring science produced temporalities. Through the Institute for Scientific Information, Garfield published a weekly newsletter, in which he argued that his institute was on the path of something like an ideal library, able to take into account a rapid increase in science information and provide data instantaneously. The institute allegedly helped scholars cope with, and control, the growth of publications. The Science Citation Index also enabled scientists to trace literature forward in time, and go from an earlier cited article to a later cited article (Garfield, 1977a: 1–2, 34–39 and 96). Through an examination of networks of citation, Garfield suggested, scholars could observe “historical processes at work” (Garfield, 1977b: 286).

In 1965, JD Bernal wrote a positive review of the Science Citation Index, arguing that it promised a “polydimensional graph,” mapping the progress of science comprehensively for the first time (Garfield, 2007; Wouters, 1999: 81). Price echoed Bernal's view, claiming that the index served as a temporal map, illustrating the history, current status and advancement of science. Each paper built upon previous articles and citations represented a “scholarly bricklaying” that was key to scholarly research (Price, 1951: 86, 1963: 64–65; Wouters, 1999: 7). Similar ideas were presented in motivations for scientometrics more broadly.

According to its advocates, the field included “chronological techniques” to pin breakthroughs to specific moments in time and map the way science grew through a chronological march of research (Kragh, 1987: 190).

The focus on citations and scientific information produced a specific image of history. For Garfield, the history of science was a series of “milestones on the road of progress” (Garfield et al., 1964: 1). The past displayed a “chronological sequence of events” where new findings depended upon previous discoveries (Garfield et al., 1964: iii).

Eugene Garfield also produced what he labelled a “historiograph” or “historiogram” (Figures 1 and 2). It was a “graphic display of citation data” that showed the chronology, interrelationship, and importance of key scientific events (Garfield, 1977b: 137). In essence, it offered a visual representation of a network of citations over time. To describe a case like the development of the DNA theory, the historiogram ranged chronologically upwards on the page, from 1820 to 1962. The network was created from 40 “nodal papers” listed in a numbered series stating the scholar and year of publication. Important publications, or “events,” in the process were connected through arrows symbolizing citations. In sum, the lines of the diagram showed “the development” of a scholarly area or of “research fronts” (Garfield, 1977b: 138, 1979: 84–86). The image, according to Garfield, was worth a thousand words as it made it “easier and quicker to grasp the total flow” of scholarship (Garfield, 1977b: 141). Garfield's claim about the potential of the historiogram was encouraged in correspondence with scholars in the history and sociology of science, including JD Bernal, Derek Price, and sociologist Robert Merton. Through the historiogram, Garfield wove together information science with the history of science (Thackeray and Brock, 2000: 1820).

Figure 1.

From Eugene Garfield, “Citation Analysis as a Method of Historical Research into Science.”

Figure 2.

From Eugene Garfield, “Citation Analysis as a Method of Historical Research into Science.”

Derek Price also used a visual interface to sketch an advancing “research front” (Price, 1965b: 512). In 1965, he published work on how the front became visible through the modeling of publications. However, Price also added an ambiguous attitude to the chronological process of discoveries. Bibliometric measurements revealed how the research front generated new knowledge, yet there was a risk of “non-citation” of older publications as only new papers garnered citations. The probability of a text being cited decreased significantly after 2 years. Behind the research front, older papers threatened to linger in obscurity (Garfield, 1964: 651–652; Price, 1964: 655, 1965b: 513–515; Yagi et al., 1996: 68).

All three writers also discussed how quantitative measurements of publications and citations could affect history writing. According to Garfield, images of a network of citations could offer a “new modus operandi” for the historian. Understandings of the past benefitted from the method, as citation analysis presented a model of scientific change along with “chronological maps” (Garfield, 1979: 81–82; Garfield et al. 1964: ii–iii). Nevertheless, they also considered the risk for traditional historians. Garfield ensured his readers that mapping citations would not entirely replace historical analysis. Interpretive work was critical, and the judgment of the historian ultimately decided how the past was understood. Yet there were inherent problems with subjective readings of the progress of science since scholars were inevitably limited by their own “experience, memory, and the adequacy of the documentation available” (Garfield et al., 1964: 1). Moreover, the labor of the historian had become arduous due to a mounting hopelessness of overviewing scientific information. Citational analysis would aid in mapping a sequence of events that could be a starting point for historical interpretations (Garfield, 1979: 96; Garfield et al., 1964: 1 and 33).

In their descriptions of the developments of scientific knowledge, Garfield and Price portrayed what can be described as a “processual temporality.” Time was a continual, chronological, and linear flow, marked by both transformations and stability (Simon, 2019: 72; Simon and Tamm, 2023: 11–12). Knowledge rested on previous studies, yet it continuously evolved through a “front” moving forward. Albeit landing in a description of the growth and discoveries of science that was commonplace in modern time thinking, they offered a specific contribution through numbers, visual connections, and network models as timebinding techniques. These templates had a temporal dimension built into them. Time was described through quantification. Their time-binding techniques had epistemological effects through building foundations for a field of research that inevitably created temporalities.

Science as processual history

In their books, JD Bernal and Derek Price, in contrast to Garfield, attempted to write ambitious historical syntheses. These efforts were not scientometrics, yet they presented a view of science as a temporal process which matched the image emerging from analyses of publications and citations. They asserted that scientific knowledge was a growing practice evolving through time rather than an abstract, universal method. Bernal was a Marxist and spearheaded a movement labeled “social relations of science,” which advocated enhanced state involvement in research. “Bernalism” included a belief in the liberating force of science, and the conviction that knowledge was both a result of, and impactful on, society. Believing that scientists should partake in the management of society, he proposed imparting emancipatory qualities to science to eliminate class distinctions (Bernal, 1954: 1 and 32). His analyses ranged from the origins of scientific scholarship to his own contemporary era. Observing recurring patterns, he emphasized the utility of history writing to gain insights into the present and future (Bernal, 1954: 6, 10, 32–34 and 869; Elzinga and Jamison, 1995: 581; Garfield, 1983: 516).

To capture the evolving nature of research, Bernal employed multiple time-binding techniques, including visual representations. His books presented a chronological and Eurocentric history. One table depicted the general history of science and technology (Figure 3). Humanity had transitioned from what Bernal described as “basic food gathering in the wild” to “mastering natural processes” through an evolving knowledge of nature. The table, spanning two pages, featured chronological lines running from top to bottom. On the left were three columns indicating historical years, eras, and societal characteristics, for instance, “1500,” “wars of religion,” and “transition to capitalism” (Bernal, 1954: 866 and 931). The most complex part of the table was the interconnections between science and technology, indicated by dotted and solid lines. Through this visual template, Bernal specified how science and technology progressed in historical sequences that led to the present (Bernal, 1954: 931).

Figure 3.

From JD Bernal Science in History.

Moreover, the table delineated connections between historical eras. The first encompassed the long history of astronomy, navigation, and calendars, which laid the foundation for physics. The second line traced the development of mechanical technology, uninfluenced by science until the advent of the steam engine. The third highlighted the evolution of the “art of changing matter,” including ceramics, metallurgy, and chemistry (Bernal, 1954: 931).

Derek Price positioned himself as a historian pinning “ancient pathological cases to the dissecting board” to achieve insights into the nature of science (Price, 1965a: 234). In Science Since Babylon, he highlighted how the history of science offered an understandings of the “evolutionary mechanism” structuring scientific endeavors (Price, 1961: 4). Like Bernal, Price portrayed eras in the past and a chronological sequence from Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Islam, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, to contemporary culture.

While these epochs had unique characters, they were a “related family, inheriting from generation to generation” (Price, 1961: 2).

According to Bernal and Price, science was also temporal in its theories and methods. Bernal suggested that the past illuminated irreversible steps that were “characteristically historical” (Bernal, 1954: 33). Both writers portrayed scientific knowledge as an “edifice under repair,” a cumulative undertaking with contributions that resembled “a pile of bricks.” Moreover, they both argued that the cumulative nature of research separated it from religion and art (Bernal, 1954: 18, 19 and 875; Price, 1961: 93; 1965a: 235).

Rather than relaying fictions of beginnings or getting rid of the past, Bernal and Price were preoccupied with meticulously describing history since it was a way to understand scientific knowledge. Scientific research consisted of chronological discoveries, yet because it was cumulative, eras were distinctly related to each other, and history writing reinforced the idea of a processual and chronological history of scientific knowledge. Moreover, science was a practice that spanned past, present, and future, and emphasizing the past brought history into the present. Rather than dismissing historical errors and mistakes, previous efforts in scientific research, according to Bernal and Price, were building blocks that offered important insights and lessons to postwar initiatives. While not a practicing historian, Eugene Garfield relayed the same notion, claiming that the ability to predict the future of science depended in large part “on our success in finding recurrent patterns of change in the past” (Garfield, 1977b: 27). The history of science, he maintained, had become increasingly important in efforts to steer science in productive directions (Garfield, 1977b: 136).

Acceleration and exponential growth

Scientific knowledge was a historical process, and the past existed in the present, but science also displayed shifting rhythms. According to Bernal, it had a history of “remarkable unevenness,” consisting of “great bursts of activity” as well as “long fallow periods” (Bernal, 1954: 23). Identifying five critical ages (early civilization, Greek antiquity, 17th-century Europe, the industrial revolution in Britain, and his contemporary era), he emphasized the significance of economic and social transformations, as well as partial breakdowns of class distinctions (Bernal, 1954: 23 and 867).

While not a marxist, Derek Price concurred with Bernal about intense transformations, arguing that even though the same growth force had been at work since the Scientific Revolution, there was an acceleration of science taking place in the 20th century (Price, 1961: ix and 4, 1963: 8, 1965a: 234). Beginning at the History of Science Congress in Amsterdam in 1950, Price examined what he repeatedly termed the “exponential growth in science” (Garfield, 2007: 3, 2009: 176; Mackay, 1984: 318; Price 1963: 5 and 14; Yagi et al., 1996: 64). Other actors shared the sentiment. In 1964, Bernal and Price became members of the advisory committee of the newly created Science of Science Foundation. Its founding director Maurice Goldsmith was a close personal friend to Bernal. When presenting the foundation, Goldsmith argued that science displayed an astounding tempo of discovery, describing what he labeled “a science explosion (like the population explosion)” (Goldsmith, 1965: 10, 1967: 519; see also Garfield, 1983: 512).

Bernal and Price viewed acceleration as a quantifiable phenomenon that could be measured. Scientific knowledge tended to double within a period of 10–15 years, according to Price, meaning that the “density of science in our culture” was quadrupling each generation (Price, 1961: 107–108, 1963: 6 and 14). The exponential development also perpetuated acceleration through a natural law of growth—“the bigger a thing is, the faster it grows” (Price, 1963: 5 and 6; see also Price, 1961: 108).

The notion of acceleration prompted the idea of the present as a time of significant transformations. While the chronological boundaries of the present were not distinct, both Bernal and Price emphasized occurrences during the 20th century. According to Bernal, his contemporary era was an “event” as important as “the emergence of the human race itself” (Price, 1961: ix, 1965a: 234; see also Bernal, 1954: 879, 1, 3, 29, 868 and 875). Scholars were not looking backwards to find their precursors. They were privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders they stood. A significant portion of scientific progress, according to Price, was happening “within living memory,” and he claimed that 80%–90% of all scientists who ever existed were still alive (Price, 1961: 107, 1963: 1–2, 1965a: 234). Maurice Goldsmith agreed that practicing scientists were forced to know what their contemporary peers were working on, since predecessors were contemporaries (Goldsmith, 1967: 525).

Price projected a future where society would be “saturated with science” (Price, 1961: 113, 1963: 2 and 97). Referring to “the immediacy of science,” he predicted that within one or two decades, humanity would have produced as much scientific knowledge and scientists as had been produced in the entire past (Price, 1961: ix, 1963: 2, 8 and 11, 1965a: 234). Using the term “big science” to denote the growth of science, Price argued that it was a transient stage. Once science saturated society, its size and influence would become more balanced (Capshew and Rader, 1992: 7; Hallonsten, 2016: 14).

As an effect of the ongoing acceleration, the present was fraught with impending threats. The growth process had to weaken within the next decades. A continued acceleration would lead to a situation where there would be “two scientists for every man, woman, child, and dog in the population” (Price, 1963: 19, 1965a: 234). Continuous exponential growth was statistically unsustainable. The law pertained to every growing phenomenon and was captured in what Price labeled “the logistic curve” (Price, 1963: 20). Eventually, growth would decrease and the curve start to flatten before it reached its “saturation limit.” Price maintained that the present showed familiar signs of such saturation. The present indicated an oncoming culmination of research conditions that had been in place for 300 years (Price, 1963: 21, 23 and 31–32, 1965a: 235).

Price also visualized the argument of an exponential growth and an oncoming saturation in a representation of the present (Figure 4). The y-axis depicted the calculated size of science, while the x-axis denoted time, without specific years indicated. The diagram featured two graphs, one with a dotted line representing a hypothetical “pure exponential growth,” and a solid line displaying the actual process of “exponential growth with saturation” (Price, 1963: 21).

Figure 4.

From Derek Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science.

Price used a question mark to denote the present, indicating its ambivalent place in the temporal course and prospects for forthcoming decades. Where exactly the present was located was a matter of interpretation, that it was part of a measurable temporal flow was not. The diagram was an attempt to turn the mathematical and statistical function of a growing phenomenon into a legible description of the timescale of scientific developments (Price, 1963: 20–21). Equal to Bernal's table of the history of science, Price's visual representations functioned as “chronographics,” translating abstract time into concrete images of temporal overview. While the descriptions of exponential growth and saturation underscored the importance of the present, through their timebinding techniques, the actors compressed past, present, and future into one fixed temporal image (Rosenberg and Grafton, 2010). The past and the future were as important as was the present to understand the changes of science. Indeed, it was the longer historical perspective that enabled a vision of the immediacy of science.

The time-binding techniques used by Bernal and Price—the genre of history writing, concepts like exponential growth, and quantitative measurements translated into visual graphs—had ontological effects. They generated a notion of past, present, and future, but also of the epoch of the now and a quickening rhythm of scientific and societal change. Time-binding techniques offered an idea of being located somewhere in time, of being part of a temporal flow.

The idea of quickening social and cultural rhythms has been a fundamental part of what influential scholars like Reinhart Koselleck and Hartmut Rosa have described as the modern world (Koselleck, 2004: 40–42; Rosa, 2013). Instead of presupposing acceleration, or employing it as a wholesale interpretive scheme for an entire epoch, I have demonstrated how the historical actors themselves contributed to the idea of an increasing pace of societal development. To put it more bluntly, JD Bernal and Derek Price were predecessors to cultural theorists such as Hartmut Rosa and Reinhart Koselleck.

Publications and acceleration

Discussions about scientific information and citations reinforced the notion of the staggering growth of science. Derek Price suggested that statistical analyses of publications unveiled how the 17th-century invention of the scientific journal and paper added to the cumulative character of scientific knowledge. Scientific journals doubled their number every 15 years, accompanied by a simultaneous outpour in the quantity of papers within those journals. The surge in scholarly journals had necessitated collections of abstracts to create comprehensive overviews. By the 1950s however, Price explained that the escalating numbers led to a new requirement for “abstracts of abstracts” (Price, 1951: 92, 1961: 95–101, 1965a: 235, 1965b: 512).

Price supported his argument with a graph that indicated the growth of journals and abstracts since the seventeenth century (Figure 5). However, it also projected into the future, displaying how in the year 2000 there would be 1 million scientific journals founded, while some would not remain in publication (Price, 1963: 9).

Figure 5.

From Derek de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science.

Eugene Garfield shared the idea of an “accelerating pace” of science, visible in publications (Garfield et al., 1964: ii). He estimated that between 1 and 3 million scholarly articles were published each year. Before World War II, he maintained, the process from basic discovery to evaluation was more protracted. In his own present, “research continues to grow at an exponential rate” (Garfield, 1955: 109; Garfield et al., 1964: 1).

Scientists produced more information in a decade than they previously had in a century.

Every “scientific dictionary is obsolete long before it is published” (Garfield, 1964: 651–652; Garfield, 1977a: 3 and 8–9). Garfield concluded that there was an “information crisis that faces us all,” and that there would be a continued “exponential growth in the production and handling of scientific and other types of information” (Garfield, 1977b: 33 and 65).

The outpouring of publications threatened to create a literature crisis. Scientists, according to Price, “felt themselves to be awash in a sea of scientific literature” (Price, 1963: 15). Challenges in effectively surveying existing research potentially resulted in duplicated studies. Organizing the expanding scientific literature became an increasingly daunting task. Individual scholars found it practically impossible to keep pace with, let alone comprehend, the rapidly expanding corpus of scientific knowledge (Price, 1963: 70–73).

Other commentators concurred with Price's and Garfield's sentiments. In 1960, philosopher Paul Weiss claimed that science grew because of a massive accretion of data. In knowledge making, there was a need for “sound dietetics” to avoid the “obesity” of simply producing more information. In short, “not every observation is worth reporting; not every report is worth recording; not every record is worth publishing” (Weiss, 1960: 1717–1719). In 1970, physicist John Ziman similarly spoke of how the expansion of science had generated a “crisis.” Big science had turned scholars into “high-powered bureaucrats,” and science from a “cottage industry” to a system of “factory production.” In particular, the industrialization of research included a degradation of criteria for publishing. There was a “swelling crowd of voices” and channels for publication were “clogged.” Ziman maintained that a campaign was needed to save the communication system of scientific knowledge (Ziman, 1970: 890–894).

Similarly, Derek Price proposed an ethics of scientific publications. Publishing should be a privilege bestowed upon them who had found out new knowledge that people needed to read. Accounts of expenditure of scholarly time and money were fiscal documents and should not be allowed to “clutter up” an already overloaded scientific literature. Everyone wanted to publish while few wanted to read (Price, 1964: 646–656). Scientists increasingly got away with everything that included more publications and credits in the name of freedom. There needed to be a “set of forces tending to oppose such free proliferation” (Price, 1964: 656).

Suggestions were also made to study the past in order to face present challenges. Paul Weiss argued that history was a “wizard” that could direct attention to productive ways of growing the human mind. The past had, after all, witnessed an overall growth of research (Weiss, 1960: 1717–1718). Price also made a historical argument about the information explosion, claiming that the same process had been in play since the late 17th century. The solution was what Price referred to as “scholarship,” that is, the “art of packing down the accrued knowledge” into efficient statements to turn it into a body of science (Price, 1963, 6364; 1964: 657). The answer to the information explosion was the maintaining of a historically shaped ethics of scholarship.

In the discourse on scientific information and citations, the shifting rhythms of scientific developments came to the fore. In particular, the actors highlighted a dense and problematic present, which was intensely felt although it had blurred chronological boundaries.

Nevertheless, they did not produce “presentism” in the sense described in research on historical time, a time-thinking void of past or future (Simon and Tamm, 2023: 34). The present was a crucial stage in a longer development of science and society. With discussions about exponential growth, several ambivalences emerged. The communication system threatened to break down, too much was published and research risked being forgotten in the flood of literature.

Science policies, looming crisis, and history writing

In 1967, science journalist Daniel S. Greenberg described science policy as taking place in institutions, which decided “what is to be researched, by whom, where, under what circumstances, and, finally, what is to be done with the results” (Greenberg, 1999: xxv). A similar image of science policy has been given by historians investigating the postwar period, discussing political, financial, and organizational consequences of an expanding science. Yet this research has rarely investigated the importance of discussions about scientific citations and information. Nevertheless, scientometrics was described as a “regulatory science,” a tool to inform research governance and foster improved relations between science and society. The scientometrician was interested in the management of research. Governments in the postwar world adhered to these ideas as they started to sponsor statistical surveys and databases (Kinouchi, 2014: 147–149; Kragh, 1987: 182; Leydesdorff and Milojevic, 2015: 322; Wouters, 1999: 14 and 97).

Several actors, including Garfield, described how information science, history of science and sociology of science were entering into new collaborations. When the Science of Science Foundation was inaugurated in 1964, Maurice Goldsmith argued that the “science of science” was a knowledge field that included the sociology and economics of science, but also “the flow of scientific information” and the planning of research. The “mechanics of scientific growth” necessitated refined measurements at the service of science policies (Goldsmith, 1965: 10; Goldsmith, 1967: 523–524). In 1974, Eugene Garfield argued that information science and sociology of science were deeply connected to “science policy studies.” Indeed, he maintained, “citation data” were significant for understanding the structure of science (Garfield, 1977b: 26). Planning society and scientific knowledge increasingly depended upon “skillful analysis and management of information” (Garfield, 1977b: 33). Analyses of citations could display scientific activity, productivity, and impact. Moreover, they could help indicate emerging research fields that deserved to have resources from the National Science Foundation steered towards them (Garfield, 1980: preface and 474–475).

The same connection between rationally understanding and planning scientific knowledge was proposed in Bernal's and Price's writings. Already in 1939, Bernal stressed the need for science to become “conscious of itself” and called for collaboration between politically mindful scientists and progressive political actors (Bernal, 1939: 385–387, 402–411, 1954: 4, 15, 880 and 918). In his 1961 work Science Since Babylon, Price remarked that hitherto, it had been “no man's business” to understand the patterns of research, suggesting that without a dependable “scientific basis” for insights about scholarship, science policy risked wasting valuable resources (Mackay, 1984: 318; Price, 1961: 124, 1965a: 233). In the first issue of the journal Scientometrics in 1978, Price repeated the argument, claiming that scholars needed to cultivate an ability to turn analytical tools of research upon scientific knowledge itself (Price, 1978: 7, 1980: ix). In the inaugural Science of Science Foundation Lecture in 1965, subsequently published in Nature, Price advocated “scientific foundations of science policy” (Mackay, 1984: 318; Price, 1965a: 233, 1978: 7–8). Maurice Goldsmith agreed, claiming that scientists knew more about the moon and the planets than they did about scientific knowledge as a social phenomenon (Goldsmith, 1967: 519).

Time-binding techniques were at the heart of claims about the necessity of a rational science policy. The descriptions of acceleration and increased rhythm of scientific growth generated concerns about the freedom and organization of scholarship. Price emphasized how acceleration in work force and publications had transformed science. The challenge was primarily evident in what he called “highly developed countries.” However, slowing down scientific growth risked repercussions as disruptive as an economic depression. It was an ambivalent stage, demanding reorganizations. The transition from the “little science” of the past to the era of “big science” raised concerns about, in Price's phrasing, “the sheer mass of the monster we have created” (Price, 1961: 121, 1963: 2–3, 1965a: 233–236; Yagi et al., 1996: 69). The shift from exponential growth necessitated stewardship and planning of the political and economic force of research. A saturated stage demanded new “ground rules,” as the future trajectory of knowledge would be deeply impacted by its organization (Bernal, 1939: 410; Price, 1961: 123, 1963: 3 and 32).

Eugene Garfield described the present as an “explosion” or a “crisis” of information. Multiple problems followed from the increasing flood of literature, and according to Garfield the situation was “chaotic” (Garfield, 1977a: 2 and 8). In the face of that situation, he argued, insights generated from the index could be utilized for national policy making. The production of indexes had, Garfield suggested, become highly practicable, and the scientific community could not afford to disregard the instrument, in the face of an accelerating tempo of scientific research (Garfield, 1964: 653; Price, 1980: ix).

Bernal and Price emphasized the importance of a historical perspective when thinking about future institutions for research. Bernal's work aimed to understand history in order to apprehend and ultimately control the process, present, and future of science (Garfield, 1983: 516). Price highlighted how central issues in the history of scholarship could give references to what he perceived as current problems afflicting the organization of scientific knowledge (Price, 1965a: 233, 1961: ix, 93–94 and 124). Historians of science should emerge as commentators capable of guiding developments in a productive direction. Only by comprehending the growth of scientific knowledge could scholars responsibly “set their house in order” for an approaching new era (Price, 1963: 115). In a passage towards the end of Science in History, Bernal argued that his primary aim had been “to search the past for clues to the future” (Bernal, 1954: 929). The same sentiment was described by Maurice Goldsmith. It was crucial to prevent repeating earlier mistakes to efficiently plan scientific growth (Goldsmith, 1965: 10, 1967: 518–519).

Actors in scientometrics emerged as science policy commentators. Through a call for refined measurements of scientific knowledge, they produced descriptions of time, and the need for governing research emerged alongside ideas of acceleration. Their time-binding techniques offered a present and possible future, marked by the contradictions of exponential scientific growth. Nevertheless, they maintained that the past should not be forgotten as a bygone era. In effect then, the way they described historical time through images, words, and numbers laid foundations to their arguments for a more ambitious responsibility for the welfare of scientific research, and ultimately for the prosperity of the future society.

Conclusion

The history of scientometrics has thus far mainly been the preoccupation of information scientists writing an internalist account of their own field (Garfield, 2009; Hood and Wilson, 2001: 291–293; Leydesdorff and Milojevic, 2015; Paoloni, 2017). In contrast, I have approached that history through the lens of research on historical time and through a broader context of science policies.

The scientific publication emerges as a key topic that generated temporalities of science and society. Discourse on science information, citations, and scientometrics produced time-binding techniques which generated, arranged, and combined temporalities. Time-binding techniques were words and concepts that evoked historical eras (“within living memory” and “20th century”), developments (“exponential growth”), or rhythms (“explosion” and “crisis”). Moreover, timebinding techniques were visual representations, which compressed complex historical processes into paper-based interfaces. Images produced by Garfield, Price, and Bernal were intentionally designed to present temporal processes, distinguishing them from works of art conveying historical experiences. Garfield's historiogram or Price's curves created, rather than portrayed, notions of time. These time-binding techniques, both words and images, intersected and reinforced each other. Furthermore, they had ontological effects by defining a historical flow of time, a process and chronology, and the place of contemporary society within that process.

While influential studies on historical time have often positioned science as a key force in shaping an overarching temporal regime of modernity, I have instead indicated how timethinking within the sciences between 1950 and 1980 presented multiple temporalities, which played out in the discourse on science information, citations, and scientometrics. In the writings of Bernal, Price, and Garfield, past, present, and future were not separated but codependent. The idea of an exponential growth of science emphasized the important of the present, yet this present only became meaningful in relation to visions of the past and future.

For instance, in Price's descriptions of change, both the 17th century and the year 2000 served as temporal reference points to define and describe his contemporary world. History writing could serve as a guide and instructor; science was historical, cumulative, and different eras related to each other.

Moreover, through their time-binding techniques, the actors portrayed various directions and rhythms in scientific knowledge. The process of scientific scholarship had intense periods of change or growth. This in turn created uncertainties as there were potentially different futures, depending on the ways in which scholarship was maintained and governed. The proliferation of publications threatened to obstruct future communication systems; previous research that had ended up behind “the research front” threatened to be forgotten, and “the saturation of science in society” could potentially mean a downturn of scientific knowledge equaling an economic depression.

Accordingly, time-binding techniques had political and institutional effects. Notions of acceleration, and growth, as well as of an information explosion and a literature crisis, shaped ideas that scientific knowledge had to be taken care of in policies and institution building. It was precisely the depiction of historical time—the moment that the actors described themselves to be part of—that warranted political and institutional initiatives. It was because of the portrayed historical, present, and potential future growth and acceleration that science needed stewardship. The amassing of ever more information could not go unchecked, and history could potentially be instructive in shaping strategies for managing scholarship. The growth of science and the information explosion called for societal interventions and organizational structures that rested on rational insights about scientific knowledge.