Ipse dixit. Book review: Kavunenko L.F., Velenteichik T.N. Predetermination and unexpectedness. Science-of-science essays on the citation leaders in the field of the history of science and technology
An excursion is given through the pages of the book dedicated to the key employees of S.I. Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IHST RAS). In their analysis, the authors of the book rely on a strict scientometric approach. However, the analysis is not limited to this approach. It is shown that the authors of the book appear to be pioneers in the combined genre of scientometrics «with a human face». The strict statistics is supplemented with the biographies of scientists and the memoirs of their colleagues as well. The history of the uneasy relations between the government and IHST, based on the example of the fate of leading scientists, can be traced from the moment of the establishment of the institute to the present day. In the Soviet times, the institute experienced ideological pressure, while today IHST shares the fate of other institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In accordance with the title of the book, the authors are apparently trying to reveal the hidden predetermination of events that determined precisely this or that creative «trajectory» in the biographies of the heroes of the book.