Eugene Garfield

Eugene Garfield was a prominent American scientist, best known for developing the concept of citation indexing and founding the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). His work had a significant impact on the field of information science, particularly in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics, as recognized by National Science Foundation and National Academy of Sciences. Garfield's contributions were influenced by the work of Derek de Solla Price, Vannevar Bush, and Warren Weaver, and he collaborated with Robert Merton and Diana Crane on various projects. His research was also related to the work of Paul Otlet, Henri La Fontaine, and Samuel Bradford.

● Early Life and Education

Eugene Garfield was born in New York City to a family of Jewish immigrants from Poland. He grew up in Bronx, New York, and developed an interest in science and technology at an early age, inspired by the work of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. Garfield attended the City College of New York and later earned his Master's degree in Library science from Columbia University, where he was influenced by the work of Melvil Dewey and Seymour Lubetzky. During his time at Columbia University, he was exposed to the ideas of Harold Bloom, Lionel Trilling, and Mark Van Doren, which shaped his understanding of information science and its relationship to humanities.

● Career

Garfield began his career as a librarian at the Army Medical Library in Washington, D.C., where he worked with John Shaw Billings and William Henry Welch. He later moved to Philadelphia and joined the staff of the SmithKline Corporation, where he worked on information retrieval systems and collaborated with Joshua Lederberg and Barbara McClintock. Garfield's work at SmithKline Corporation was influenced by the research of Vannever Bush and Norbert Wiener, and he was also familiar with the work of Alan Turing and Claude Shannon. In the 1950s, Garfield became interested in the concept of citation indexing, which was inspired by the work of Shepard Stone and Derek de Solla Price.

● Founding of

the Institute for Scientific Information In 1960, Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), a company that specialized in bibliographic databases and citation indexing. The ISI was initially based in Philadelphia and later expanded to London and other locations, collaborating with British Library and National Library of Medicine. Garfield's vision for the ISI was influenced by the work of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, who had developed the concept of the Mundaneum. The ISI's flagship product, the Science Citation Index (SCI), was launched in 1964 and quickly became a standard tool for scientists and researchers, including James Watson and Francis Crick.

● Development of Citation Indexing

Garfield's development of citation indexing revolutionized the way scientists and researchers accessed and evaluated scientific literature. The Science Citation Index (SCI) and other ISI products, such as the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), provided a comprehensive and systematic way to track citations and references in scientific papers, influencing the work of Robert K. Merton and Diana Crane. Garfield's work on citation indexing was recognized by the National Science Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences, and he was awarded the John Price Wetherill Medal in 1984, along with Stephen Jay Gould and Edward O. Wilson. The concept of citation indexing has since been widely adopted and is used in various fields, including medicine, physics, and biology, with contributions from David Baltimore and Rosalyn Yalow.

● Awards and Legacy

Throughout his career, Garfield received numerous awards and honors for his contributions to information science and bibliometrics, including the ASIS&T Award of Merit and the Derek de Solla Price Memorial Medal. He was also elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Academy of Sciences, along with Joshua Lederberg and Barbara McClintock. Garfield's legacy extends beyond his own work, as his concepts and methods have influenced a generation of information scientists and researchers, including Deborah Lipstadt and Lawrence Lessig. His work has also had a significant impact on the development of Google Scholar and other search engines, which rely on citation indexing and link analysis to rank and retrieve web pages, as recognized by Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee.

● Later Life and Contributions

In his later years, Garfield continued to work on various projects, including the development of new bibliographic databases and citation indexing tools, collaborating with Microsoft Research and IBM Research. He also wrote extensively on topics related to information science and bibliometrics, publishing papers in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and Scientometrics, and was a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops, including ASIS&T Annual Meeting and International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics. Garfield's contributions to information science and bibliometrics have had a lasting impact on the way scientists and researchers access and evaluate scientific literature, and his legacy continues to inspire new generations of information scientists and researchers, including Nicholas Christakis and Judy Wajcman.