Abstract

Founded in 1958, ISI was a company focused on indexing scientific publications. A for-profit business, ISI would transform how researchers thought of themselves and their careers. To a large extent, ISI inaugurated the citation metric obsession that now dominates many fields of scholarship. For decades, hosts of indexers at its Philadelphia headquarters painstakingly keyed into computers millions of scientific citations from the US academic literature. The only twentieth-century company dedicated to citation indexing for science, ISI had a database so large that no other firm dared enter the market until the 2000s. Its star product was the yearly multivolume publication, the Science Citation Index (SCI), which allowed users to see who had cited whom in the scientific literature. Since the late nineteenth century, bibliographic bureaus had created and sold indexes of legal, academic, and patent documents. By counting the number of times people were cited, scientific relevance could be measured through quantitative ranking. By mapping networks of citations it might even be possible to reveal, empirically and from the ground up, a unified structure connecting all scientific disciplines: the “natural order in science.” Was this structure hierarchical, dominated by a handful of geniuses working at a small number of elite institutions? Or was it more like a beehive, the collective product of thousands of persistent researchers? If a “natural order” could be revealed, its practical implications—for research funding above all—would be profound.

Today, in many parts of academia, measuring the value of research and the individual merits of scholars in terms of rankings and citation metrics has become inevitable. By following the members of the ISI in their postwar efforts to index, rank, and visualize scientific production, I reveal how earlier interwar dreams for establishing the unity of science paradoxically led to the ascendance of the impact factor.