In the early 1830s, Alphonse de Candolle, a Geneva naturalist, eager to discover the contribution of different nations to the development of the sciences, invented a new method in the history of science. To gauge the standing of each national scientific group, he counted the foreigners elected to membership in the three major scientific societies - the Paris Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of London, and the Berlin Academy of Sciences - and calculated the share of the total membership held by each national group. Dividing this share by the size of the country, counted in million inhabitants, gave him a statistical measure of the “scientific value,” as he called it, of one million inhabitants in a given country. Although Candolle's measure was necessarily crude and approximate, it was a methodological innovation and a precursor to present-day scientometrics. The four studies of the Nobel population presented in Part II follow a line of inquiry that goes back to Candolle's comparative method and the concepts on which it was based. Broadly speaking, they relate to the social history of science, a field that until recently was not of major interest to historians of science, who were more concerned with ideas and discourse or the “great men” of science.

Not just with respect to methodology, but conceptually as well, Candolle's Histoire des sciences… was a precursor in the social history of science when it was finally published in 1873 - for three reasons at least.