1. LIS Pioneer: Eugene Garfield
Background
Born: September 16, 1925
Known as the “Father of Scientometrics
and Bibliometrics” (Brynko, 2007)
Founder and Chairman Emeritus of
Thomas Scientific (Connor, 2008)
Pioneered the field of citation indexing
and analysis (Hane, 2005)
Eugene Garfield
http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/
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2. LIS Pioneer: Eugene Garfield
Background cont.
Paula J. Hane refers to Garfield
as a “renaissance man, who has
been a chemist, information
scientist, editor, publisher,
database producer, and "science
communicator,“ (2005).
ISI Presents: Putting Scientific Information to
Work
A lecture given by Garfield to inform scientist and
librarians about how to use the Science Citation Index was
transformed into this 1972 film. It was separated into 3
parts to be posted on YouTube in 2008.
Garfield is also a prolific writer
and creator of ISI, the Institute
for Scientific Information
(Brynko, 2007).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwPRI9ug6BY
(Garfield, 2013)
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5. Career
In 1951, he began
working with the Welch
Medical Indexing Project
at Johns Hopkins
University to improve the
Current List of Medical
Literature (later called
Index Medicus) using
machine compilation
methods (Presley &
Caraway, 1999).
http://olms.cte.jhu.edu/olms2/data/ck/sites/1351/images/Johns_hopkins_un
1).jpg
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6. Career
Based on work began with
the Welch Project, in 1955
he began publishing Current
Contents which quickly grew
to encompass several
publications in different
disciplines.
Current Contents contained
the contents pages from
current journals in each
discipline.
(“Career Overview,” n.d.)
http://faculty.libsci.sc.edu/bob/ISP/garfield2.htm
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7. Career cont.
In 1954 Dr. Garfield formed his own company, Eugene
Garfield Associates, which was renamed Institute for
Scientific Information in 1960.
The Institute for Scientific Information began publication of
the Science Citation Index (SCI) in 1964.
(Presley & Caraway, 1999)
The rest of Dr. Garfield’s career has been devoted to
developing and enhancing tools for researchers, including
The Scientist (“Career Overview,” n.d.).
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8. Career cont.
SCI was combined with the Social Sciences and the
Arts & Humanities citation indexes to become the
Web of Science.
Dr. Garfield was on the board of Research America,
the board of overseers of the University of
Pennsylvania Libraries and Temple University Health
System, Inc., and served as president of ASIST.
(Hane, 2005)
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9. LIS Pioneer: Eugene Garfield
Contributions to LIS
Dr. Garfield’s contributions to LIS cannot be
overstated.
The advances that were made because of his dynamic
new use of indexing resulted in anentirely new approach to research.
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10. Web of Knowledge
•
Scientific Citation
Index
•
Social Science Citation
Index
•
Arts & Humanities
Citation Index
What began as an index of
scientific journals has
become an extensive
interdisciplinary web of
citation (Presley, 1999).
Medline/ MEDLAR
• products of the Welch Project,
which provides medical
information for consumers
(Thomson, 2014).
HISTCITE
• currently offered software
package which is the most
advanced realization of
Garfield’s original
bibliometric vision
(Thomson, 2014).
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11. LIS Pioneer: Eugene Garfield
Garfield, 2005
Contributions cont.
Dr. Garfield innovated the
field of bibliometrics so far
ahead of its time that it’s
taken technology 40 years to
fully realize his vision.
Impact Factor- counting the
number of citations and thus
quantifying the relevance of
scholarly articles in a field
(Thomson, 2014). The discovery
of the “impact factor” has
radically changed the process and
quality of research in the
scientific and eventually every
field.
Citation Anyalysis- Grandfather
of Google?
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
cited Garfield’s work in
citation analysis as a
foundation for their work on
PageRank (Bensman, 2013).
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12. References
Bensman, S. J. (2013). Eugene Garfield, Francis Narin, and Pagerank: The theoretical bases of the
Google search engine. (Master's thesis), Available from arXiv.org. (1312.3872)Retrieved from
http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.3872v1
Brynko B. (2007). An Interview with Eugene Garfield - A Lifetime of Achievement and Still
Going Strong. Information Today 24(1), 21. Retrieved from
http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/infotoday2007.pdf
Connor, E. (2008). Interview with Eugene Garfield, Founder and Chairman Emeritus of
Thomson Scientific. Journal Of Electronic Resources In Medical Libraries, 5(3), 261-265.
doi:10.1080/15424060802222448
Hane, P. J. (2005). Eugene Garfield turns 80. Information Today, 22(9), 24. Retrieved from
http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=brb&AN=502961860&scope=site
Garfield, E. (2013). Eugene Garfield, Ph.D. Retrieved from http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/
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13. LIS Pioneer: Eugene Garfield
References
Garfield, E. (2013). Career Overview. Retrieved from
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/overvu.html
Garfield, E. (2013). Education. Retrieved from
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/educat.html
Garfield, E. (Photographer). (2005, October 24). Most highly cited [Web Photo].
Retrieved from http://www.the-scientist.com/?
articles.view/articleNo/16769/title/Most-Highly-Cited/
Presley, R. L., & Caraway, B. L. (1999). An interview with Eugene Garfield. Serials
Review, 25(3), 67-80. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0098-7913(99)00038-6
Thomson Reuters. (2014). History of citation indexing. Retrieved from
http://wokinfo.com/essays/history-of-citation-indexing/
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