Belver C. Griffith

Belver C. Griffith

Belver C. Griffith (1931-1999) was an American information scientist. Working with Howard D. White, Griffith created the co-citation of authors methodological technique.

Life

Belver Callis Griffith was born on March 28, 1931, in Hampton, Virginia. He earned a BA in psychology at the University of Virginia, 1948-1951, then at the University of Connecticut he received an MA (1953) and PhD (1957) in psychology.

In the early 1960s, Griffith examined scientific information exchange in the field of psychology as part of a research project with the American Psychological Association. Since then he mainly worked on the quantitative analysis of scientific communication, bibliometrics, scientometrics and scientific communication. In 1969, Griffith became a professor at the School of Library and Information Science at Drexel University in Philadelphia. In the 1970s he collaborated with Henry G. Small at the Institute for Scientific Information on co-citations as a means of analyzing formal structures and as a complement to the informal social structure in science. Together they published a number of important papers on co-citation analysis. He also co-authored with Howard D. White and others.

Griffith was married to Carolyn Adams, with whom he had three daughters: Caitlin, Wynne and Leigh. He died on October 23, 1999 in Philadelphia.

Contributions

• Professor at Drexel University, Philadelphia, 1969-1991.
• Directed the American Psychological Association's "Project on Scientific Information Exchange," 1961-1969.
• Published more than 200 scientific papers and edited 2 books.
• Collaborated with Henry Small in the early 1970s on the creation of a database that maps scientific research.
• Collaborated with Howard D. White in creating the "co-citation of authors" analytical method for measuring and mapping science.
• Honorary Research Fellow, University College London, 1975-1976
• Visiting Fellow, University of Sussex, 1975-1976
• Visiting Fellow in Psychology, Princeton University, 1983
• Visiting Professor, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, 1984
• Received grants for his research from the National Science Foundation, Public Health Service, National Library of Medicine, and the Department of Education.

Publications

• A descriptive study of information needs and practices of clinical psychologists, [by] Suzanne Prescott & Belver C. Griffith. Washington: American Psychological Association, 1970.
• Key papers in information science, ed. by Belver C. Griffith. White Plains, N.Y. : Published for the American Society for Information Science by Knowledge Industry Publications, 1980. Open access [1]
• Howard D. White and Belver C. Griffith, 1981. "Author Cocitation: A Literature Measure of Intellectual Structure." Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS), May 1981, volume 32(3), pp. 163-171. DOI:10.1002/asi.4630320302.
• The structure of the social and behavioral sciences literature, by Belver C. Griffith & Henry G. Small. Stockholm : Royal Institute of Technology Library, 1983.

Awards

• Belver Griffiths Memorial issue. Scientometrics 51, no. 3 (2001).
• Pioneer in Information Science Award, Chemical Heritage Foundation and ASIS, 1998.
  • On the Pioneers see Buckland chapter in 1998 Book.
• Derek de Solla Price Award for Scientometrics, 1997.
• American Society for Information Science. Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award, 1982.
• American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS - Information, Computing, and Communication) Fellow, 1982
• Drexel University Research Achievement Award, 1980.

Personal Papers

Drexel University Libraries (Philadelphia, PA). "Belver Griffith papers, 1962-1989," 0.67 cubic feet. Mostly correspondence with collaborators and other scholars studying scientific communication and information science. Includes manuscripts and a memoir (1972). Finding aid at [2].

Further reading

• Laura Joy Moyer. "Bibliography of publications of Belver C. Griffith." Scientometrics 51, no 3 (2001), pp 469–479.
• White, H. D., & McCain, K. W. (2000). In memory of Belver C. Griffith. Journal of ASIS, 51(10), 959-962. doi:10.1002/1097-4571(2000)51:10<959::AID-ASI80>3.0.CO;2-1
• Belver C. Griffith. Wikipedia (in German). https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belver_C._Griffith.
• Who’s who in library and information services. Joel M. Lee, ed. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p 186.