American Men of Science: A Biographical Directory

The starring system was Cattell's method for identifying the top one thousand American scientists through peer assessment rather than bibliometric counting. He selected ten prominent representatives from each of twelve principal scientific disciplines and asked them to rank an initial list of men 'known to have carried on research work of any consequence' . The representatives received slips containing names and addresses, which they arranged in order of merit and returned . An asterisk was then affixed to the principal field of research for the top one thousand scientists in the natural and exact sciences . In the first edition, this meant starring, for example, 80 mathematicians and 50 astronomers . Cattell acknowledged complications such as interdisciplinarity and self-evaluation, noting that scientists were equally inclined to overrate as to underestimate their own contributions .

Cattell recognized that the peer judgments he had collected for individual scientists could be detached from their original purpose and aggregated at the institutional level. He awarded universities points based on the position of their affiliated scientists among the top thousand, creating a weighting system that produced a quantitative 'scientific standing' for each institution . This maneuver involved sorting researchers into cohorts and treating their relative positions as comparable units of academic quality . The resulting rankings, published in Science in 1910, constituted the first known systematic ranking of American universities by academic quality . Historians of science have identified this as the moment when Cattell 'invented' the academic quality rating, an innovation that would eventually transform higher education governance and competition .

The first edition, published in 1906, contained brief sketches of about 4,000 living American men and women of science . Cattell had begun the project as a manuscript reference list for the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which appropriated funds toward clerical and office expenses . The directory's stated purpose was to make 'men of science acquainted with one another and with one another's work,' addressing the isolation that Cattell believed impeded scientific progress . Entries included name, address, birth date and place, honors, learned society memberships, scientific field, educational degrees, and institutional affiliations . Cattell included members of major national scientific societies who returned completed questionnaires, and some whose work had contributed to pure science through teaching or administration .

The second edition, published in 1910, expanded to over 5,500 names and required 528 pages; nearly a third of the entries were new, and existing sketches were revised in nearly every case . The fourth edition, published in 1927, dealt with approximately 13,500 individuals, which Nature's reviewer took as 'an approximately close measure of the number of professional men of science in America' . Of the first starred 601, only a single individual was described as an amateur, and roughly 60 percent of leading American scientists were engaged in teaching, 16 percent in research institutions, 12 percent in government employ, and 10 percent in applied science . The directory continued through eleven editions, with the twelfth renamed American Men and Women of Science .

Cattell himself identified several methodological difficulties that remain relevant to contemporary rankings. He noted that interdisciplinary scientists risked receiving lower positions because their contributions to a single field were assessed in isolation . He also observed that self-evaluation was unreliable, with scientists equally likely to overrate or underestimate their own work . A more fundamental criticism concerns the circularity of using peer judgment to identify the leading scientists whose presence then determines university rankings; the quality of the judgment depends on the prestige economy it purports to measure. The Nature review of the fourth edition also implicitly questioned the valuation of professional over amateur science, lamenting the decline of independently wealthy researchers who could devote themselves entirely to discovery without teaching or administrative burdens .

The directory extends the institutional critique Cattell developed in Science and Education, particularly the third volume University Control. Where University Control argued that autocratic presidential governance impeded scientific progress, American Men of Science supplied the empirical infrastructure for evaluating that claim. By quantifying the distribution of scientific talent across institutions, Cattell created a tool that could expose administrative failures and reward genuine research strength. The directory also embodies Cattell's conviction—shared with Galton—that human faculties and institutional performance could be measured and ranked, and that such measurement was a prerequisite for reform. The ranking of universities by scientific strength was not merely an academic exercise; it was intended to hold institutions accountable to the standards of the scientific community rather than to administrative convenience.