Eugene Garfield

Eugene "Gene" Garfield (born September 16, 1925 in New York City) 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.

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.