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, which was located in Philadelphia PA. 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, while he was at the Institute for Scientific Information during the 1960s. The creation of the Science Citation Index (SCI) made it possible to calculate impact factors[1], which measure the importance of scientific journals. It caused 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.
References
- ^ Garfield E (2006). "The history and meaning of the journal impact factor". JAMA 295 (1): 90-3. doi:10.1001/jama.295.1.90. PMID 16391221.
