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View from the Bibliographer's Desk : Exploring Two-Decades of Citations in the Discipline of History of Science

2022 - Leo S. Olschki

P. 29-48

  • I have been the History of Science Society's bibliographer since 2002. During that time, I have curated a large database of citation data going back to 1970. For this special issue, I surveyed the set of 16.800 journal article citations that were published in sixty core journals in the field of history of science, technology, and medicine over the eighteen-year period from 2002 through 2019. In this brief article, I have sought to highlight a few trends in the field over that time, I studied two areas of interest: co-authorship and article content. With regard to the nature of co-authorship, I find that there is a gradual but unambiguous increase in co-authorship in the discipline, a trend that is echoed in other areas of publication, including co-editing of journals.
  • With regard to the content of articles, I made two types of surveys. First, I looked at how trends in the frequency of publication changed with regard to eight topic areas: religion and science, occult and related topics, evolution, environment, energy and climate, colonialism, race, and indigenous peoples. I show that the data tends to confirm my suspicion that with regard to such issues as environment, climate, and race, there is a very significant increase. In addition, I also look at the frequency that major historical figures are discussed in articles, concluding that there has actually been very little change in the canon over the eighteen years and that women remain quite understudied in the field. [Publisher's text]

Is part of

Physis : rivista internazionale di storia della scienza : LVII, 1, 2022