Editor’s Introduction: Science, Teaching and Robert K. Merton

Foreword to the book, Citation Indexing by Robert K. Merton

I like to read some general significance into Eugene Garfield’s having offered me the privilege of introducing the reader to this book, which sets out the history, method, and implications of his distinctive contribution to the advancement of science: the first multidisciplinary citation index to the scientific literature. My being a close friend cannot account for his having done so. Gene has ...

Quant Corner Robert Merton Merton model for valuing corporate debt

‚robert merton, who’s best known for his academic work in developing option-pricing models, published his first scholarly paper on a topic far removed from finance: Gulliver’s Travels. While an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York, he wrote a piece for a literature class that analyzed the physical impossibility of a flying island as described in Jonathan Swift’s classic work. Merton...

Making Science by Serendipity. A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity

Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (Englishlanguage translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book about a word may surprise those who are not acquainted with Merton’s work, but certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master. Searching, defining, and formulating concepts has always b...

The Matthew Effect in Science, II : Cumulative Advantage and the Symbolism of Intellectual Property by Robert K. Merton

T HE SUBJECT OF THIS ESSAY is a problem in the sociology of science that has long been of interest to me. That problem, a candid friend tells me, is somewhat obscured by the formidable title assigned to it. Yet, properly deciphered, the title is not nearly as opaque as it might at first seem. Consider first the signal emitted by the Roman numeral II in the main title. It informs us that the pap...

Science as a Service [Guest editors' introduction]