Derek J. de Solla Price - Scientific Contributions

Scientific Contributions

Price's major scientific contributions include:

• studies of the exponential growth of science and the half-life of scientific literature; together with the formulation of Price's Law, namely that 25% of scientific authors are responsible for 75% of published papers (Price 1963);
• quantitative studies of the network of citations between scientific papers (Price 1965), including the discovery that both the in- and out-degrees of a citation network have power-law distributions, making this the first published example of a scale-free network;
• a mathematical theory of the growth of citation networks, based on what would now be called a preferential attachment process (Price 1976);
• an analysis of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek analogue computer and astronomical instrument (Price 1959, 1974).