武夷山

1995年3月9日

Dear Dr McGrath:

Thank you for putting forward a thought-provoking question.

Any science has some basic quantities to be observed and measured. In physics, time, force, mass, length and so on are such quantities. They are agreed upon by international physics community. But in bibliometrics, informetrics or scientometrics, we haven’t got such basic, commonly agreed quantities. So one unknown is:

What are the basic quantities to be measured?

Take bibliometrics as an example. SCI seems to be most relied upon in bibliometric studies. Then are citations adequate to be basic quantity? We all know the amount of citations varies from field to field. Life science has more citations than, say, engineering. If a country gets more citations since it concentrates on life sciences, can we say that this country is scientifically better off than the other country which pays more attention to agriculture or metallurgy? In natural sciences, references are taken as citations. In social sciences and humanities, very often footnotes are taken as citations. Are footnotes and references are the same in nature?

In scientometrics, when you study scientific man-power, you have to count scientists. But different nations have different definitions of “scientists”. Does this mean that international comparative studies of scientific man-power is impossible?

So far, three-metrics lack a solid foundation. That’s why after so many years, various scholarly discussions haven’t converged into a mainstream as it should be for a normally evolving science. Instead, we have witnessed more and more branching.

（此处略去两幅手绘图。一幅图表示，很多支流汇聚为主流；另一幅图则显示，很多支流先是汇集成若干干流，然后又再次分出许多支流。）

I really doubt what the future of three-metrics will be. We have to agree on some basic quantities through discussion.

Say: age of scientists when they made major discoveries;

Citations? (before the better indicator comes into being);

Ratio of the number of cited books to the total of published books for a given field ( nation, university, time period…)…

Without such agreement, scholars in three-metrics will forever talk at cross-purposes.

Since July 1994, I have been working at the Chinese Embassy as a second secretary, and I’ll work here until July 1996, when I’ll go back to the Institute of Scientific and technical Information of China.

Best regards.

Sincerely,

Wu Yishan

(这封信的对象的全名我记不清了，也许是W. E. McGrath。这封信是读了他的一篇论文后有感而发。)