Past, Present and Future of Scientific Information - Eugene Garfield

Meet & greet with Eugene Garfield (Institute for Scientific Information), one of the pioneers in the field of information science, co-inventor of bibliometrics and scientometrics. Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Institute for Scientific Information, Garfield is now Thomson Reuters Scientific and President and Founding Editor of The Scientist.

Webinvitation

Eugene Garfield, noted innovator and inventor in the field of citation analysis, received a B.S. and a master's degree in library science from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in structural linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. His career in scientific communication and information began in 1951 when he joined the Welch Medical Indexing Project at Johns Hopkins University. The goal of the project was to examine problems of medical information retrieval and the application of new methods to indexing biomedical literature. The Welch Project planted the seeds for information discovery and recovery in scientific communication and information science that have distinguished Garfield's career.

In 1955 Garfield produced a contents-page publication covering the social sciences and management literature. Two years later he began producing a similar service covering the literature of interest to pharmaceutical companies. In 1958 Garfield and Joshua Lederberg collaborated on Genetics Citation Index. Garfield began regular publication of the Science Citation Index (SCI) in 1964 through the Institute for Scientific Information, the name his firm assumed in 1960. The SCI was recognized as a basic and fundamental innovation in scientific communication and information science. It covered virtually all disciplines and fields of science, comprehensively indexing all types of sources.

Most importantly, the SCI uniquely indexed the references cited in the articles it indexed. Garfield went on to create new tools including Index Chemicus, Current Contents, The Genuine Article, citation indexes for the social sciences (SSCI), as well as the arts and humanities (A&HCI), Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings and Books, and others. In 1986 he founded The Scientist, a biweekly newspaper for the research professional, which reports on news and developments within the sciences. He has published more than 1,000 essays in Current Contents over the past 25 years and has published and edited commentaries by the authors of more than 5,000 Citation Classics.

Free entrance, in English (no translation)

07.10.2015 - 18:15

Lieu: 
Mundaneum
Public: 
In English
Prix: 
Free entrance