Eugene Garfield

Eugene Garfield (1925-2017) was a prominent US information scientist and a pioneer of scientometrics.

Life

Eugene Garfield was born on September 16, 1925 in New York City, served in the US Army during World War II, and received a B.S. in Chemistry from Columbia University in 1948. In 1951 when he joined the Welch Medical Indexing Project at Johns Hopkins University where he edited, using punch cards, a list of subject headings which became a prototype of the Medical Subject Headngs (MeSH). He also produced Contents in Advance, a current awareness publication that reproduced the contents pages of library documents and journals. This was the prototype of Current Contents.

Garfield earned an M.S. in Library Science from Columbia University in 1954, then worked as a part-time consultant for Smith, Kline, and French in Philadelphia and founded DocuMation, Incorporated, a publishing service which began publishing Current contents. Garfield proposed citation indexing in 1955, which he first proposed in an article published in Science in 1955. In 1958, the firm was renamed Eugene Garfield Associates, relocated to Philadelphia and in 1960 renamed the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), with Garfield as President and CEO.

In 1961 he completed a Ph.D. in Structural Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation on An Algorithm for Translating Chemical Names to Molecular Formulas.

In 1964 ISI began publishing the Science Citation Index (SCI) which indexed the references in the articles it indexed. Enhancement and new information tools followed. In 1986 Garfield founded and was editor-in-chief of The Scientist, is a bi-weekly newspaper for research professionals. He also worked on algorithms to identify and differentiate significant works when searching.

In 1992 ISI was acquired by Thomson Scientific and Healthcare. The business was subsequently renamed Thomson ISI and became part of Thomson's Intellectual Property and Science unit. Garfield stayed with Thomson ISI as Chairman Emeritus. Eugene Garfield died February 26, 2017.

A detailed biography is provided in the "Background Note" of his 2009 oral history [1]. Also a timeline is available. [2]

Contributions

Garfield was world-famous for his development of his development of citation indexes and his leadership of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). He developed Current Contents, Science Citation Index and many other indexes.

Garfield developed the Rota Form Index which used the Hill formula index as output and processed it to as many outputs as the number of separated symbols for the production of Index Chemicus. Garfield published a paper on the Rota Form Index in 1963. He was associated with the discovery and pioneering of information science. He worked on a team with Sanford Larkey (librarian of the Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins), on an early automation project.

Publications

Garfield presented numerous speeches and published extensively. He authored more than a 1,000 weekly essays in Current Contents and published or edited commentaries by the authors of over 5,000 Citation Classics. He also wrote a large number of journal and periodical articles.

"Citation indexes for science: A new dimension in documentation through association of ideas." Science 122, issue 3159 (1955): 108–111.
"Science Citation Index"—A New Dimension in Indexing: This unique approach underlies versatile bibliographic systems for communicating and evaluating information." Science 144, no. 3619 (1964): 649-654. [3]
"Can citation indexing be automated." In Statistical association methods for mechanized documentation, symposium proceedings, vol. 269, pp. 189-192. 1965. [4]
"Citation analysis as a tool in journal evaluation: Journals can be ranked by frequency and impact of citations for science policy studies." Science 178, no. 4060 (1972): 471-479. [5]
"Is citation analysis a legitimate evaluation tool?." Scientometrics 1, no. 4 (1979): 359-375.
"The history and meaning of the journal impact factor." JAMA 295, no. 1 (2006): 90-93.
"From the science of science to Scientometrics visualizing the history of science with HistCite software." Journal of Informetrics 3, no. 3 (2009): 173-179. [6]

Offices

Information Industry Association Pres. 1972-74.
ASIST President, 1999-2000; Delaware Valley Chapter President, 1970;

Awards

Garfield received many awards, including multiple honorary doctorates.

ASIST Award of Merit, 1975; Best Information Science Book.
American Chemical Society Skolnik Award (ACS) for outstanding contributions to the chemical information field, 1977; Patterson-Crane Award, 1983.
Information Industry Association Hall of Fame Award.

Papers

Science History Institute, Philadelphia. Eugene Garfield Papers (2009-036). 1944-2011. 167.0 Linear Feet (115 Record Boxes, 10 Photo Album Boxes, 2 CD-ROM Boxes, 2 Film Cans, 1 Hollinger Box, and 1 Videotape Box). Professional files, personal files, papers and presentations, journal articles, publications, audio-visual materials, electronic storage materials, and photographic materials of American information scientist and Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) founder Eugene Garfield. [10]
Eugene Garfield, Ph.D. (1925-2017) University of Pennsylvania. [11]