Social Studies of Science 34: 845-853, 2004

The Unintended and Unanticipated Consequences of  Robert K. Merton

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This brief, personal and affectionate memoir reflects my forty-year association with Robert K. Merton, which began with my chance encounter with his 1961 article in the New Scientist about the phenomenon of multiples in the history of scientific discoveries. His discussion supported my interest in using the Science Citation Index to demonstrate unwitting replications in science. He received one of the earliest printouts of the putative SCI and then played a substantial role as mentor and advisor in its development and subsequently the Social Sciences Citation Indexes and Arts and Humanities Citation Index.

Using the HistCite system of algorithmic historiography, we have created a series of online databases available to the public which contain bibliographic records and citation links to a series of Merton�s publications. These include the �Matthew Effect,� Science and Technology in the 17th Century, On the Shoulders of Giants, and his classic 1936 paper on �unintended consequences,� which has been cited in more than 160 journals. We intend to create additional HistCite collections for his other works. While commenting upon his worldwide scholarly influence, the paper calls particular attention to Merton�s impact on information science and scientometrics.

It took me several months to find the will to write this memoir about Robert K. Merton. His death left me in an enervated state of funk . I am grateful to Steve Turner and Harriet Zuckerman for having patiently urged me to take my place in this memorial issue. Over the 40 years of my association with Bob Merton, he became not only a mentor, teacher, and advisor, but also a surrogate father. Indeed, when my youngest son was born in 1985, my wife Catheryne and I named him Alexander Merton Garfield. In the 18 years that ensued, Bob and Harriet regularly followed Alex�s development from infant to teenager. One of the most memorable of many occasions was the time that Alex played a violin solo for Bob in New York City. It is a source of great comfort that we all were able to dine with Bob and Harriet just a few months before he died. And in his last days, I was able to visit him in the hospital, kiss him on the forehead, and inwardly wish him goodbye.

How did it all begin? As I scanned the New Scientist for November 2, 1961, I came across an article on the �Role of Genius in Scientific Advance.�¹ I remember being particularly struck by the fact that the author was a professor at Columbia University from which I had received both my B.S. and M.S. degrees. The article�s subtitle stated that :


The �multiples� in scientific discovery had been one of the motivating factors in my pursuit of citation indexes for information retrieval as reflected in my 1955² and 1964³ papers in Science, and in several others thereafter. A stated goal of the SCI was to prevent or identify unwitting duplication of scientific discoveries. I often found examples of such duplication through bibliographic coupling⁴ or by �cycling� references that were cited by bibliographic plagiarists, as Merton might have described them.

I recall reading Bob�s 1961 article several times. It appeared at a critical period in ISI�s development as we were then at the mid-point of our NIH-sponsored Genetics Citation Index project. We had just completed the first large-scale prototype of the Science Citation Index and were able to provide printouts to various individuals in order to test its potential usefulness. However, it wasn�t until March 1, 1962, that I wrote to him as follows:



Six weeks after writing him, I heard from Merton on April 19, 1962. His response follows:

�Dear Dr. Garfield:

I just returned to find your note, and I did want to get a reply off to you before I leave on another leg of a research trip. (I should probably explain that I am on sabbatical leave this year.) As is so characteristic of him, Professor Kusch once again demonstrates his capacity to scent a good problem. After having read the offprint you were good enough to send me, I am persuaded that your materials should be a rich source for the sociologist of science. As it happens, I am now in the midst of working on a problem in this field which needs precisely the kind of evidence you are putting together in your Citation Indexes. Perhaps we can get together on my return from the Pacific Coast in a few weeks. What would you say to that?

Sincerely yours, Robert Merton�

It is not clear when and if that meeting occurred. There was no record kept of our telephone conversations but Harriet Zuckerman tells me she attended my SCI / SSCI seminar in New York in 1965.

We did meet in person at a AAAS meeting in Dallas in 1969 where we both were presenting papers, as Bob noted in his foreword to the fifth volume of my Essays of an Information Scientist in which he included the text of the two letters quoted above.⁵

The theme of multiples recurs again and again in Bob�s work in the sixties and seventies but he returned to it once more when he wrote a gracious foreword to Citation Indexing.⁶  It was a pleasant surprise to learn that this foreword has been cited explicitly by several dozen authors.


So I pondered how I could uniquely contribute to this special issue. By chance I began by looking at his earliest papers. In spite of 40 years of exposure to his work, I realized for the first time that at the age of 26 Bob had already published his seminal paper �The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action.�¹³ It occurred to me that a brief historiographic-bibliometric analysis of that 66 year old article might be appreciated. Space does not permit me to list the more than 240 papers reported in the ISI Citation Indexes that have cited this 1936 work by the then budding sociologist/historian of science. The complete bibliographic collection is included in a HistCite database posted on my      website¹⁴ which also has a similar analysis of Bob�s Mathew Effect¹⁵ and other works including �Science and Technology in the 17th century�.


Apart from the explicit citations to the �unanticipated consequences� paper, there are countless other implicit references to this work to be found not only on the Internet, but also in books in great abundance. Since this topic is also discussed in various sections of his Social Theory and Social Structure¹⁷ the impact of the early 1936 paper is partially reflected in citations to this classic book as well as to his other work. It is important to note that the SSCI begins its coverage with 1956 literature. Therefore, there is a twenty-year hiatus in the citation history of this paper. The paper itself is reprinted in his Sociological  Ambivalence¹⁸. Not surprisingly, citations to that chapter are also to be found � an example of citation synonymy. We have merged such synonymous citations into the HistCite file. A search of DialIndex on Dialog identified no less  than 60,000 papers using that term which occurred in over 550 different databases.

That Bob Merton was one of the most-cited scholars of the 20th century is a truism. His influence in sociology is obvious but his impact outside that domain is less obvious but also quite significant as the data illustrate. Some of this effect was noted in the festschrift cited in reference 9.

I observed this more recently for the field of information science. When we analyzed the history of bibliographic coupling,¹⁹ and the closely related phenomenon of co-citation,²⁰ the significance of his collaboration with Harriet Zuckerman on the sociology of refereeing as reflected in �Patterns of Evaluation in Science - Institutionalization, Structure and Functions Of Referee System,�^{21, 22} became apparent.

Title	Pubs
American Sociological Review	7
Social Problems	5
Annual Review Of Sociology	5
Kolner Zeitschrift Fur Soziologie Und Sozialpsychologie	4
American Journal Of Sociology	4
ISIS	3
Law & Society Review	3
Sociological Forum	3
Social Forces	3
Archives Europeennes De Sociologie	3
International Sociology	3
Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics Zeitschrift fur Die Gesamte Staatswissenschaft	3
Social Science & Medicine	3
Pacific Sociological Review	3
Revue Economique	3
Sociological Practice	3

FIGURE 1: JOURNALS PUBLISHING PAPERS INVOLVING UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

HistCite also provides various analyses by journal and author. Figure 1 provides a list of 10 mainly sociological and economics journals in which 3 or more papers were published by authors who cited this 1936 paper. The complete list involves 161 different journal titles. One should keep in mind that the average sociological paper is infrequently cited. In ISI's Essential Science Indicators²⁷
database it can be seen that the average paper in the social sciences of the past decade is cited less than six times. I estimate that the average paper of the previous decade has been cited less then ten times.

Considering the differences in the size of the 1930's literature one has to be impressed when a paper published over 65 years ago is cited over 200 times. Furthermore, from my experience in publishing Citation Classic commentaries in the social sciences, most papers cited over that threshold would qualify for that designation. Incidentally, Bob's own published commentary on the 1949 edition of Social Theory and Social Structure qualified since from 1961-1980, it had been cited 175 times."²⁸ Since then it and subsequent editions have been cited in over 5,000 scholarly papers.

Cited references outside of this network.
Total: 13778 (top 100 shown).
Sorted by LCS.

#	LCS	Reference
1	15	MERTON RK, 1957, SOCIAL THEORY SOCIAL  WoS
2	14	OLSON M, 1965, LOGIC COLLECTIVE ACT  WoS
3	13	MERTON RK, 1968, SOCIAL THEORY SOCIAL  WoS
4	12	PFEFFER J, 1978, EXTERNAL CONTROL ORG  WoS
5	12	MEYER JW, 1977, AM J SOCIOL, V83, P340  WoS
6	12	GRANOVETTER M, 1985, AM J SOCIOL, V91, P481  WoS
7	11	SELZNICK P, 1949, TVA GRASS ROOTS  WoS
8	11	MARCH JG, 1958, ORGANIZATIONS  WoS
9	10	GIDDENS A, 1984, CONSTITUTION SOC  WoS
10	10	MERTON RK, 1949, SOCIAL THEORY SOCIAL  WoS
11	9	DIMAGGIO PJ, 1983, AM SOCIOL REV, V48, P147  WoS
12	9	MEAD GH, 1934, MIND SELF SOC  WoS
13	8	HANNAN MT, 1989, ORG ECOLOGY  WoS
14	8	MERTON RK, 1938, AM SOCIOL REV, V3, P672  WoS
15	8	WILLIAMSON OE, 1975, MARKETS HIERARCHIES  WoS
16	8	NELSON RR, 1982, EVOLUTIONARY THEORY  WoS
17	8	THOMPSON JD, 1967, ORG ACTION  WoS
18	8	PARSONS T, 1951, SOCIAL SYSTEM  WoS
19	7	BLUMER H, 1969, SYMBOLIC INTERACTION  WoS
20	7	CROZIER M, 1977, ACTEUR SYSTEME  WoS
21	7	BOUDON R, 1982, UNINTENDED CONSEQUEN  WoS

FIGURE 2: PAPERS CO-CITED WITH MERTON�S 1936 PAPER (Outer References)

Since HistCite processes every work cited by the papers in the collection it is possible to observe the list of so-called �outer references� which gives one an idea of the papers and authors who have been co-cited with the 1936 paper. These pairs of co-cited papers or authors form the core of putative research fronts. Not surprisingly the most co-cited work in this collection is Merton�s Social Theory, Social Structure. Each edition is listed separately. The other items listed provide some interesting insight on the key players on this �topic�. As a non-expert I was surprised to learn about the 1982 book by the distinguished French sociologist R. Boudon²⁹ on �Unintended Consequences of Social Action.� Though it is out of print it is amazing to find that no less than 25 other book titles include the term �Unintended Consequences.�

The widespread impact of this term warrants an investigation by someone like William Safire, the OED and other etymological works. The OED does provide a definition of  �Mertonian� as being  �of, relating to, or characteristic of Merton or his theories, especially those relating to the sociology of science.� But the etymolology of unintended or unanticipated consequences is a gap that needs to be filled. The Mertonian definition of the term and its sociological and scholarly nuances is essential. Rob Norton, the former economics editor of Fortune, provides an extensive discussion in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (see URL). ³⁰

As a lasting tribute to Bob, I have assumed the mission of making bibliometric data on the work of Robert K. Merton conveniently available as a collection of HistCite files. I hope this will make it easier for future scholars to interpret his impact and significance for the social studies of science.

Bob Merton was a constant source of positive reinforcement. And he was always gracious and generous in offering his expert editorial skills to help find the best way to express an idea. But I will remember him most for the sheer pleasure of his intellect and the joy of his acquaintance. I take great satisfaction in knowing that I did not wait until his death to tell Bob of my admiration for him. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I can refer you to the full text of my first tribute to him.³¹ The following quote from that piece best expresses my feelings: