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Short abstract:

The paper seeks to demonstrate the influence of epidemiological reasoning in the setup of the early information sciences and asks how infrastructures such as Eugene Garfield's citation index made an epidemiology of science doable.

Long abstract:

In 1972, the physician Kenneth Warren and the library scientist William Goffman published a paper to propose an epidemiological approach to the exponential proliferation of scientific and medical literature. Adapting a mathematical model developed to characterise the 4-factorial distribution cycle of schistosomiasis, a disease involving a parasitic worm, the authors proposed to think of scientific literature in strict analogy: the author as host, the manuscript as infective embryo, the journal as snail and the published paper as a larva infective to hosts. At the heart of their endeavour stood the hope to improve the recognition of papers of good quality (highly infectious) so that overall exposure of authors to lower quality could be reduced.

Warren and Goffman were not the only ones seeking to transfer epidemiological approaches into the understanding of knowledge distribution. Most prominently, Eugene Garfield of the Institute for Scientific Information (founded in 1956) referred retrospectively to his own work on citation-based ranking as the ‘epidemiology of science’ (1987).

With this paper I seek to illuminate the significant impact of epidemiological reasoning in the emerging information science. Rather than merely a transfer of disease models to the ecology of literature, I explore how infrastructures like Garfield’s citation index made such epidemiological approaches doable – and profitable.

The paper aims to move historiography beyond accounts of the metaphorical usage of “social contagion” across disciplines. Instead, I show that this is a history of adopting and expanding an epistemology of epidemiological reasoning to reshape the principles of scientific knowledge production.