Non-indexed eponymical citedness III. Systematic study: 1939, 1969

Abstract

In the third study of his publication series concerning the literature phenomenon marked in Ihe main title, the author reports the first step of his systematical study: the research on double cross section. This research covered the total 1939 and 1969 volumes of the Journal of the Optical Society of America (JOSA), and the total 1939 volume and the January issue of the 1969 volume of Ihe Physical Review (PH R). In the course of exploration of the phenomenon the methodological basis of research was the principle of "reduction to the indisputable minimum". The double cross section research was suitable also to detect the change in the phenomenon and its trend.
The research provided both numerical and non-numerical results. The main findings of the first type are:
• (he number of physicist authors cited in the text of publications only in non-indexed, eponymic form reached several hundred in each volume of both the two physical journals. even in the mature period of the Little Science of handicraft nature: in the thirties; the number of eponymous authors cited non-indexedly has grown significantly by 1969;
• the population of eponymous authors cited in the text of publications actually, but only in this non-indexed way, i.e., the real elite of physicists, is very stable: 51% of authors cited eponymically in 1939 is alsó member of the authors' group cited eponymically 30 years later, in the age of publication explosion of the institutionalized Big Science;
• the non-indexed reference stock of publications of both journals for both 1939 and 1969 is in the order of magnitude of 1000 tor JÓSA resp. of 10 000 for PH R, and this non-indexed stock amounts to the third of the quantity of indexed references' stock for both 1939 and 1969;
• the quantitative data verify as facts that non-indexed eponymical citedness is an old- standing and widely popular phenomenon, a steady and essential element in physics literature; and that the stock of non-indexed eponymical references in physics publications is a considerable factor of documentedness of these publications.
These results disprove unanimously and definitely the relevant and contradicting unproved opinions of two American science-sociometrologists, J. R. Cole and S. Cole, which served as part of the methodological ground of their indexed "citation analysis" author study in the depressing literature case of the so-called but false "Ortega Hypothesis".
The non-quantitative (but quantified) results are associated with the eponymical presence of eponymous authors in the literature, with its publicational distribution and with the variation of these moments, with the steadiness of the authors' eponymical presence etc. These results justify the declaration of two conclusions:
• the nature (permeation, continuity etc.) of the eponymical presence of authors in the literature is in close relation with the publicational distribution of eponymical presence;
• between the continuity ol an author's eponymical presence in the literature and the author's meas-ure of eponymical citedness there is no relation.
In the next study of this series, the secondstep of the systematic study: the longitudinal section research will be reported.