JASON VARNEY PHOTOGRAPHYFounder of The Scientist and the Institute for Scientific Information, Eugene Garfield passed away this February at the age of 91. He is credited with launching the field of citation analysis, having devised the journal impact factor, the commonly used metric that quantifies the reach of a specific journal based on citations of its publications. However, he himself cautioned against the practice of relying on impact factors as a way to rank publications, researchers, or their institutions.
He founded the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) in 1955, where he launched the Citation Index, a system to chart connections between pieces of scientific literature that later became the basis of the Web of Science. “Before [ISI’s] Web of Science, scientists and researchers had very inefficient methods for finding and tracing other scientific documents. The citation database was not just an intellectual achievement, but also an engineering achievement,” C. Sean Burns, an assistant professor of information science at the University of Kentucky whose PhD research was supported partially by a fellowship bearing Garfield’s name, told The Scientist in February. “His work enabled information retrieval to scale up. . . . This created, basically, the entire information science field as we know it today.”
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