JASON VARNEY PHOTOGRAPHYEugene Garfield, who launched the field of citation analysis, died yesterday (February 26) in Pennsylvania. He was 91.
“He was an amazing character whose influence on information science, writ large, can’t be underestimated,” H. Carton Rogers III, vice provost and director of libraries at the University of Pennsylvania, where Garfield served as a member of the Libraries’ Board of Overseers, said in a statement emailed to The Scientist. “He will be greatly missed.”
Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1955. In addition to the ISI’s Science Citation Index, a system used to chart connections between pieces of scientific literature that later became accessible electronically via the Web of Science, Garfield launched Current Contents, an early effort that sought to compile important information on the scientific literature. He founded The Scientist in 1986, as a news magazine for researchers.
“He was ...
