@article{ref1,
title="Revisiting the "quiet debut" of the double helix: a bibliometric and methodological note on the "impact" of scientific publications",
journal="Journal of the history of biology",
year="2010",
author="Gingras, Yves",
volume="43",
number="1",
pages="159-181",
abstract="The object of this paper is two-fold: first, to show that contrary to what seem to have become a widely accepted view among historians of biology, the famous 1953 first Nature paper of Watson and Crick on the structure of DNA was widely cited--as compared to the average paper of the time--on a continuous basis from the very year of its publication and over the period 1953-1970 and that the citations came from a wide array of scientific journals. A systematic analysis of the bibliometric data thus shows that Watson's and Crick's paper did in fact have immediate and long term impact if we define &quot;impact&quot; in terms of comparative citations with other papers of the time. In this precise sense it did not fall into &quot;relative oblivion&quot; in the scientific community. The second aim of this paper is to show, using the case of the reception of the Watson-Crick and Jacob-Monod papers as concrete examples, how large scale bibliometric data can be used in a sophisticated manner to provide information about the dynamic of the scientific field as a whole instead of limiting the analysis to a few major actors and generalizing the result to the whole community without further ado.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0022-5010",
doi="",
url="http://dx.doi.org/"
}