Research Fronts 2014 : 100 Top Ranked Specialties In The Sciences And Social / quote 9 of 9
The geography of science
Price hailed the work of Small and Griffith, remarking that while co-citation analysis of the scientific literature into clusters that map on a two dimensional plane “may seem a rather abstruse finding,” it was “revolutionary in its implications.”He asserted: “The finding suggests that there is some type of natural order in science crying out to be recognized and diagnosed. Our method of indexing papers by descriptors or other terms is almost certainly at variance with this natural order. If we can successfully define the natural order, we will have created a sort of giant atlas of the corpus of scientific papers that can be maintained in real time for classifying and monitoring developments as they occur.”