Abstract
Historians of science have analyzed in detail the conceptual transformations that gave physics its modern character in the first half of the twentieth century. Rarely provided in these narratives, however, is a feeling for the global scene of the physics community. How many publishing physicists were there around 1900? How many in 1925 or 1939? Did most physicists publish as single authors or in teams, and how did they compare with chemists or mathematicians in terms of scientific collaborations? What are the links between these disciplines? I propose to undertake such a global analysis of the trends that can be captured through a bibliometric analysis of hundreds of thousands of scientific papers and the more than one million references in them.
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Notes
It should be kept in mind that France is clearly underrepresented in the Century of Science database, which includes only two French physics journals, the Annales de chimie et de physique (1900–1913) and the Journal de physique et le radium (1920–1944), and the Comptes rendus of the Paris Academy of Sciences, which covers all scientific disciplines. Physics and chemistry combined are represented by the first two journals. To compensate for this underrepresentation, I attribute the total number of papers in these two journals to physics. As for the Comptes rendus, I have analyzed a sample of about 7,000 papers over the period 1900–1944 and found that one-third of them pertain to physics. Further, in their pioneering study of the state of physics around 1900, Paul Forman, John L. Heilbron, and Spencer Weart, using four different samples from British and German indices of scientific papers, found that Germany accounts for about 29% of the published papers, the United Kingdom for 21%, France for 18%, and the United States for 12%. If I attribute one-third of the papers in the Comptes rendus to physics and add the results to those of the Annales de chimie et de physique, I get comparable data within their suggested error of 20%; see Forman, Heilbron, and Weart, “Physics circa 1900” (ref. 1), p. 116, Table E.1.
Forman, Helibron, and Weart found that around 1900 the difference in physics productivity of the major producing countries was essentially due to their differences in per capita national incomes; see their “Physics circa 1900” (ref. 1), p. 127, Table E.5.
Although books and other kinds of documents also are cited, I have retained only journals and have calculated the percentages for the total sample of the cited journals for which I have attributed a country of origin. I have excluded self-citations of journals and kept only citations between journals.
I have followed Forman, Heilbron, and Weart and attributed to a given country all of the papers that appeared in their national journals, a procedure that introduces “no appreciable error”; see their “Physics circa 1900” (ref. 1), p. 115.
In network analysis, the centrality of a node is calculated as the sum of all of the links to which it is connected. The most central nodes are the ones with the largest number of relations with other nodes, and the least central ones are at the periphery of the network. On centrality, see Linton C. Freeman, “Centrality in Social Networks Conceptual Clarification,” Social Networks 1 (1978/79), 215-239.
The class of “general” journals includes nondisciplinary journals like Nature, Science, and the proceedings of academies, which cover many scientific disciplines.
References
The average number of papers published per author in the period 1900–1945 is about 1.3 for mathematics, 1.4 for physics, and 1.7 for chemistry, figures that are similar to the average of about 1.6 for physics around 1900; see Paul Forman, John L. Heilbron, and Spencer Weart, “Physics circa 1900: Personnel, Funding, and Productivity of the Academic Establishment,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 5 (1975), 1–185; on 119.
On the growth of mathematics, see Karen Hunger Parshall and Adrian C. Rice, ed., Mathematics Unbound: The Evolution of an International Mathematical Research Community, 1800–1945 (Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, 2002).
On the rise of American physics, see Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977; Second Edition Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Spencer R. Weart, “The Physics Business in America, 1919–1940: A Statistical Reconnaissance,” in Nathan Reingold, ed., The Sciences in the American Contetxt: New Perspectives (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979), pp. 295–358.
Yves Gingras, “Mapping the Changing Centrality of Physicists (1900–1944),” in Daniel Torres-Salinas and Henk F. Moed, ed., Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) (Madrid, Spain, 2007), pp. 314–320.
Matthew L Wallace, Yves Gingras, and Russell Duhon, “A New Approach for Detecting Scientific Specialties From Raw Cocitation Networks,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60, No. 2 (2009), 240–246.
Acknowledgments
I thank my assistant Alain Couillard for preparing the data, and Roger H. Stuewer for his editorial work on my paper.
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Yves Gingras is Canada Research Chair in History and Sociology of Science and Professor in the Department of History at the Université du Québec à Montréal. His research focuses on the mathematization of the sciences and the uses of formal analogies in physics. He is also working on the global transformations of the sciences in the twentieth century using bibliometric and social-networks techniques.
Appendix: Physics Journals Covered in the Century of Science Database
Appendix: Physics Journals Covered in the Century of Science Database
Annalen der Physik (Germany)
Annales de Chimie et de Physique (France)
The Astrophysical Journal (USA)
Journal of Research of the National Bureau of Standards (USA)
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (USA)
Journal de Physique et le Radium (France)
Journal of Applied Physics (USA)
The Journal of Chemical Physics (USA)
Journal of Physics/Academy of Sciences of the USSR
Journal of the Optical Society of America (USA)
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (UK)
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (UK)
Philosophical Magazine (UK)
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London [Series A] (UK)
Physica (The Netherlands)
Physical Review (USA)
Physikalische Zeitschrift (Germany)
Proceedings of the Physical Society of London (UK)
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London [Series A] (UK)
Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society (UK)
Review of Scientific Instruments (USA)
Reviews of Modern Physics (USA)
Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Germany)
Zeitschrift für Physik (Germany)
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Gingras, Y. The Transformation of Physics from 1900 to 1945. Phys. Perspect. 12, 248–265 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-010-0017-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-010-0017-6
Keywords
- Bibliometrics
- co-citation networks
- history of physics 1900–1945