Information Obtainable from Analyses of Scientific Bibliographies
R.T. Bottle · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1973
WHATMORE can be obtained from bibliographies than access to the primary literature for which they serve as keys?Because they are ready-made collections of documents about a particular facet of science or technology, they are increasingly being used as source material by historians and sociologists of science.Unquestionably they record the (recent) past; can they be used to predict the future?If the answer is even "possibly," then it would be a very valuable exercise to analyze them.Analyses of bibliographies would provide an alternative to asking the opinion of experts about the likely course of future events, a sophisticated version of which is the so-called Delphi technique.The experts are, of course, familiar with all aspects of a subject, including its literature, and may well have assessed intuitively trends in the literature which will form part of their judgment of that subject's future.Literature trends can be quantitatively observed without expert knowledge of a specific subject and possibly provide an industrial company, for example, with predictive material without the need to divulge its interest in the subject to an outside expert.These two approaches exhibit distinct analogies with the so-called fundamental and chartist approach to investment analysis-both of which are considered notoriously unreliable!The major difference between the approaches is the time scale involved; while investment analysis charts can point quite quickly to a change in the underlying factors involved, the publication of research is the culmination of a process where the operative decisions were perhaps made several years previously-indeed a decision to abandon further work on the project may have been made long before even a draft manuscript of an eventual publication had been