Stephen Cole (June 1, 1941 – September 7, 2018) was an American sociologist, who was a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Stony Brook University (retired since 2011).
He was a founding member of Columbia's Program in the Sociology of Science, along with Robert K. Merton, Harriet Zuckerman, and his brother Jonathan R. Cole.
The project was supported by the National Science Foundation for 20 years and produced a substantial body of both theoretical and empirical work.
Although it met with initial resistance, it is today widely used as a measure of scholarly impact, and there is a very substantial literature on it.
Cole also published works dealing with the sociology of education as a profession, with racial discrimination in science, and several widely used textbooks.