The historical technique based on collective biographies and similar sources is called prosopography. What characterizes this method is that it uses data concerning many people and events as its sources.

Prosopography is not a method that is peculiar to history of science and it is only recently, in fact, that it has been introduced into this field in an elaborate form. This happened via inspiration from general social history, especially from economic history, that has long used quantitative methods of the same type as those used in prosopography. However, collective biographies have been used sporadically in the study of science for over 100 years, starting with Francis Galton (1822–1911) who compiled statistics about eminent British scientists so as to study the relationship between heredity, environment and genius. The statistical studies on geniuses made by Galton and others were strongly influenced by the extreme social-Darwinism of the Victorian age; today they are regarded as classic examples of so-called scientism. Wilhelm Ostwald used membership of scientific academies as a measure of ‘greatness’ and studied the distribution of members of such institutions with regard to sex, race, religion and nationality. Among other things, Ostwald concluded that women had no scientific ability and that Teutonic men had a particular aptitude for science (it is perhaps unnecessary to state that Ostwald was a German male). Studies of ability and genius like those of Ostwald and Galton are not, of course, comme il faut today, although their research methods in more refined forms have been taken over by modern quantitative sociology and historiography.