1 Gaming Metrics Before the Game: Citation and the Bureaucratic Virtuoso

On June 13, 1974, in the foothills of Stanford University, a group of social scientists, information entrepreneurs, and government officials gathered to deliberate what had recently become pressing questions: Can science be measured? How? And what might be the consequences of doing so? The conference on “science indicators” at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) was among the first ever held on the subject. But the invitations sent to participants had already raised the question how measuring scientific productivity might alter the very object under study: “the creation and official use of indicators may lead to shifts in the range and kind of scientific activity itself.”1