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).
Read more about this topic: Derek J. De Solla Price
Famous quotes containing the word scientific:
“If a man is a good lawyer, a good physician, a good engineer ... he may be a fool in every other capacity. But no deficiency or mistake of judgment is forgiven to a woman ... and should she fail anywhere, if she has any scientific attainment, or artistic faculty, instead of standing her interest as an excuse, it is censured as an aggravation and offence.”
—E.P.P., U.S. women’s magazine contributor. The Una, p. 28 ( February 1855)