contributions Price's major scientific contributions include: Price's square root law or Price's law, on the topic of authors publishing academic literature, proposed that half of the publications come from the square root of all authors. For example, if 100 papers are written by 25 authors, then out of the 25 authors will have contributed 50 papers. However, empirical data suggests that Price's law is a poor fit, while the related Lotka's law is a good fit; Studies of the exponential growth of science and the half-life of scientific literature; Quantitative studies of the network of citations between scientific papers (Price 1965), including the discovery that both the in- and out-degrees of a citation network have power-law distributions, making this the first published example of a scale-free network; Price's model, a mathematical theory of the growth of citation networks, based on what would now be called a preferential attachment process (Price 1976). This is closely related to the Matthew effect; An analysis of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek analogue computer and astronomical instrument (Price 1959, 1974). A full bibliography is provided by Yagi et al. (1986) Selected publications Reprinted 2019 by Good Press . See review . see review (Winner of 1976 JASIS paper award.) Second edition 1986; with supplement 2008: . See also Equatorium A Treatise on the Astrolabe Notes References External links Derek de Solla Price (1983) This Week's Citation Classic: Little Science, Big Science. ISI. Current Contents 29:18 (July 1983). Derek John de Solla Price Medal of the journal Scientometrics; International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics 1922 births 1983 deaths Alumni of University of London Worldwide Information scientists People from Leyton English atheists English Jews Bibliometricians Historians of science Jewish atheists Jewish historians Yale University faculty 20th-century English historians English people of Spanish-Jewish descent Leonardo da Vinci Medal recipients Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences