EUGENE GARFIELD Biography - Famous Scientists

 
 

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EUGENE GARFIELD

Name: Eugene Garfield                                                                 
Born: 16 September 1925                                                               
                                                                                       
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, Pennsylvania.                                                 
                                                                                       
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, 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.