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).
His scholarly work was on the development of the sociology of science as an academic field. 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.
He collaborated with his brother Jonathan Cole on studies of the system of social stratification in science and on the reward system in science, examining the extent to which the social system of science approximated a meritocracy, culminating in their co-authored book, Social Stratification in Science (University of Chicago Press, 1973). In this work, they developed the use of citations as a measure of scientific quality and impact, the first social scientists to do so. 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.