Eugene Garfield

This article is about the scientist. For the lawyer and railroad executive, see Eugene K. Garfield.

Eugene "Gene" Garfield
Born	(1925-09-16) September 16, 1925 New York City, New York, United States
Education	Ph. D., University of Pennsylvania (1961)
Occupation	Scientist
Known for	One of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics Science Citation Index Institute for Scientific Information
Website
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/

Eugene "Gene" Garfield (born September 16, 1925) is an American scientist, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He received a PhD in Structural Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961. Dr. Garfield was the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which was located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ISI now forms a major part of the science division of Thomson Reuters company. Garfield is responsible for many innovative bibliographic products, including Current Contents, the Science Citation Index (SCI), and other citation indexes, the Journal Citation Reports, and Index Chemicus. He is the founding editor and publisher of The Scientist, a news magazine for life scientists. In 2007, he launched HistCite, a bibliometric analysis and visualization software package.

Following ideas inspired by Vannevar Bush's famous 1945 article "As We May Think", Garfield undertook the development of a comprehensive citation index showing the propagation of scientific thinking; he started the Institute for Scientific Information in 1955. The creation of the Science Citation Index made it possible to calculate impact factors, which measure the importance of scientific journals. It led to the unexpected discovery that a few journals like Nature and Science were core for all of hard science. The same pattern does not happen with the humanities or the social sciences.^{[citation needed]}

Garfield's work led to the development of several Information Retrieval algorithms, like HITS and Pagerank. Both use the structured citation between websites through hyperlinks.

See also

• Bradford's law
• Bibliometrics
• Scientometrics
• Impact factor

General references

• Garfield, Eugene (July 15, 1955). "Citation indexes for science...". Science (AAAS) 122 (3159): 108–111. doi:10.1126/science.122.3159.108. Retrieved 2011-05-09.  The concept of the Science Citation Index is first articulated.
• Garfield, Eugene (September 16, 2005). "The Agony and the Ecstasy—The History and Meaning of the Journal Impact Factor". International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication (Chicago). Retrieved 2011-05-09. 
• "History of Citation Indexing" (Available online). Thomson Reuters. October 15, 2010. Retrieved 2011-05-09. "Dr. Eugene Garfield, founder and now Chairman Emeritus of ISI® (now Thomson Reuters), was deeply involved in the research relating to machine generated indexes in the mid-1950s and early 1960s" 
• "Fifty Years of Citation Indexing and Analysis" (Available online). Thomson Reuters. October 6, 2010. "Fifty years ago, on July 15, 1955, Eugene Garfield, Ph.D published his groundbreaking paper on citation indexing, "Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas." This innovative paper envisioned information tools that allow researchers to expedite their research process, evaluate the impact of their work, spot scientific trends, and trace the history of modern scientific thoughts." 

External links

• Eugene Garfield's home page
• Works by or about Eugene Garfield in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Eugene Garfield tells his life story (video)