Articles by Eugene Garfield

The publication I launched a quarter century ago has come further than anyone ever expected.

Joshua Lederberg (1925—2008) was one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, and my good friend.

In the April 1 issue,1 I discussed new gratis features that are now accessible from the Institute for Scientific Information: highly cited authors at www.isihighlycited.com and the editorial sections of Essential Science Indicators at www.in-cites.com, www.esi-topics.com, and www.sciencewatch.com. As I wrote then, I founded ISI in 1954, but I am no longer a shareholder, although I retain an office and the title of chairman emeritus. Essential Science Indicators and its editorial features such as

The Scientist's new format represents a turning point in the long evolution of my involvement in the field of scientific communication. Although a major part of my work has been devoted to improving scientific information retrieval and dissemination, I have been identified increasingly with the emergent fields of scientometrics and research evaluation. Citation data have become a normal—though sometimes controversial—part of the evaluation of institutions and individuals. One can onl

In 1992, I discussed "bibliographic negligence," and a decade earlier I discussed "citation amnesia."

Eugene Garfield Our reader surveys indicate that "Hot Papers" is one of our most popular editorial features. When and how did it begin? After the Science Citation Index was launched in the '60s, we soon learned that the age of the average cited paper, depending upon the field, was 5 to 15 years old. In molecular biology, while 25 percent of cited papers were about 2 years old, the rest were much older. These data initially obscured the fact that a small group of papers were well ci

Over the years I've heard complaints from scientists abroad, especially those whose native language is not English, that their views are ignored by the English-speaking world. (British researchers often complain that their literature is ignored by Americans but certainly not for linguistic reasons.) I myself regularly encounter interesting editorial comments in Spanish, French, German, and other foreign language journals that I must ignore, simply for lack of fluency. English has increas

Eugene Garfield In 1963, I was recruited by Saul Gorn and Morris Rubinoff to teach a course in information retrieval at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering. I found it useful to characterize information retrieval (IR) by a simple dichotomy: information recovery and information discovery. The inspiration for the term recovery comes from the French term retrouver--to find again. I had, at that time, already been publishing Current Contents for more than five

Most scientific journals begin their instructions to authors with a strong statement against prior or double publication. The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) states, "Manuscripts containing original material are accepted for consideration if neither the article nor any part of its essential substance, tables, or figures has been or will be published or submitted here before appearing in the Journal." Most journals then list exceptions to the blanket rule; for example, presentation of th

It was Derek De Solla Price who in 1963 said that "80 to 90 percent of all the scientists that have ever lived are alive now."1 While De Solla died just 20 years later, most of his contemporaries have survived. A majority of these researchers were, at one time or another, readers of Current Contents (CC). The success of CC was due to three critical factors--timeliness, its multidisciplinary nature, and access to author addresses. Its address directory was estimated at one time to generate as

For several decades Current Contents was the vehicle I used for personal expressions of pleasure or discontent about various practices in science and scholarship. Remarkably, even after decades in some cases, not much has changed since I first voiced an opinion on subjects such as anonymity.1 One of my pet grievances with scientific and other publications has been the implied use of the editorial "we" and its expression in the form of anonymous editorials. Whether in Nature or the New York Tim

My first paper proposing the creation of the Science Citation Index® (Science, 122(3159): 108-111, 1955) began with a quotation from P. Thomasson and J.C. Stanley: "The uncritical citation of disputed data by a writer, whether it be deliberate or not, is a serious matter. Of course, knowingly propagandizing unsubstantiated claims is particularly abhorrent, but just as many naïve students may be swayed by unfounded assertions presented by a writer who is unaware of the criticisms. Burie

Date: July 6, 1998Cumulative Impact Factors In the February 2, 1998 issue of The Scientist (12[3]:11-12), we published the list of the 100 highest-impact journals for the period 1981-95. This study emphasized long-term cumulative impact rather than short-term or current impact. The main focus of these data were the articles published in 1981-82. We chose these two years so that 15 years of cumulative citations could be compiled. To many of our readers, these years must seem remote. But for some

Date: February 2, 1998 Chart 1 Chart 2 The first published report on journal impact factors was included in E. Garfield, I.H. Sher, "New factors in the evaluation of scientific literature through citation indexing," American Documentation, 14[3]:195-201, July 1963. The late Irving H. Sher, who then was director of R&D at the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), and I created the impact factor to help evaluate and select journals for Current Contents. The current i

In 1959, C.P. Snow presented a lecture on The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, published as a landmark book (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1959). This classic expresses the tension between the cultures of the sciences and the humanities. There are clashing cultures in communication technology, as well. Since the advent of the Internet, the postal system has been aptly described as "snail mail." This traditional postal culture is rapidly dying. It is increasingly used merely