Research studies in patterns of scientific communication: I. General description of research program

Abstract This article is the first in a series which describes the general procedures and some findings of over seventy studies which we conducted from 1966 to 1971 on the information-exchange activities of over 12,000 scientists and engineers in a sample of nine physical, social and engineering sciences. We designed the studies so that (a) the full spectrum of scientific communication media could be explored, (b) the various studies were coupled in order that data obtained from one study could be directly related to those obtained from other studies, (c) the scheduling of the studies was conducted in real time in order that the same body of information could be followed from its inception to its final integration into the general body of scientific knowledge, and (d) the same studies were conducted for all nine disciplines being studied in order that genuine comparisons could be made among them. The data are now stored on machine-readable magnetic tapes and will be made available to scholars in the field of information science.