| 1 | Name: | Dr. Eugene Garfield | |
| Institution: | The Scientist; Institute for Scientific Information/Thomson Scientific | ||
| Year Elected: | 2007 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 504. Scholars in the Professions | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1925 | ||
| Death Date: | February 26, 2017 | ||
Eugene Garfield was a pioneer in information retrieval systems and the inventor of Current Contents (1958), Index Chemicus (1960), Science Citation Index (1964), Social Sciences Citation Index (1970), and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (1975). He was an eclectic science communicator, founding publisher/editor of The Scientist, and author of over 1,000 articles and books. His annual impact factor rankings of ISI's Journal Citation Reports (1975) have promoted high journal standards worldwide. His HistCite system (1964) of algorithmic historiography now maps research topics from searches of the ISI Web of Science database of 30,000,000 articles. Modern scholarship in the sciences and the humanities relies heavily on the retrieval of information and the assessment of its impact on the thinking of others. Garfield developed the technique of Science Citation. Papers are ranked based on the number of times that they are referenced in other papers. Google is based on the same principle. Web sites are ranked in the list that is generated by the search words or phrase based on the number of times other Web sites refer to them. In their Stanford thesis that is the basis of the Google concept, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin cited Garfield's invention of Science Citations. His invention has been a major contribution to information technology and to American and world business. Eugene Garfield died February 26, 2017, at the age of 91. | |||