Derek John de Solla Price (22 January 1922 – 3 September 1983) was a British physicist, historian of science, and information scientist.

He was known for his investigation of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek planetary computer, and for quantitative studies on scientific publications, which led to his being described as the "Herald of scientometrics".

[1] Returning to England, Price decided to make a career in the history of science, and enrolled for a second Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, supported by an ICI fellowship.

[3] He had initially intended to work on a survey of scientific instruments, but during his studies he discovered The Equatorie of the Planetis, a Peterhouse manuscript in Cambridge University Library.

The manuscript, written in Middle English, describes an Equatorium, an astronomical calculating instrument, and became the basis of the thesis for his PhD, which he obtained in 1954, and also for a book, published the following year.

[1] He believed the work to be by Geoffrey Chaucer, who had written A Treatise on the Astrolabe, but it is now attributed to a St Albans monk called John Westwyk.

One colleague alleged that Price, who came from a lower-class background, was "not socially house-trained," and he suspected that he was turned down for university positions for personal reasons.

[3] Early in that year, he met Eugene Garfield, founder of the Science Citation Index (SCI), and formed a lasting collaboration.

He argued that as science grew exponentially it presented new challenges to policy-makers, and that they could be helped by the kind of Scientometric work he was carrying out and promoting.

[11] Price died of a heart attack at the home of his oldest friend, Anthony Michaelis, in London, during a visit to attend the wedding of his niece.

Since 1984, the Derek de Solla Price Memorial Medal is awarded by the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics to scientists with outstanding contributions to the fields of quantitative studies of science.