Eugene Garfield | |
---|---|
Eugene Garfield at the Heritage Day awards in 2007
|
|
Born | Eugene Eli Garfinkle September 16, 1925 New York City |
Died | February 26, 2017 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
(aged 91)
Alma mater | |
Thesis | An algorithm for translating chemical names to molecular formulas (1961) |
Known for | |
Notable awards |
|
Website www |
Eugene Eli Garfield (September 16, 1925 – February 26, 2017) was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He helped to create Current Contents, Science Citation Index (SCI), Journal Citation Reports, and Index Chemicus, among others, and founded the magazine The Scientist.
Garfield was born in 1925 in New York City as Eugene Eli Garfinkle, and was raised in a Lithuanian-Italian Jewish family. He studied the the University of Colorado and University of California, Berkeley before getting a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Columbia University in 1948. He went on to comple his PhD in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, completed in 1961 for developing an algorithm for translating chemical nomenclature into chemical formulas.
Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which was located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ISI formed a major part of the science division of Thomson Reuters. In October 2016 Thomson Reuters completed the sale of its intellectual property and science division; it is now known as Clarivate Analytics.
Garfield is responsible for many innovative bibliographic products, including Current Contents, the Science Citation Index (SCI), and other citation databases, the Journal Citation Reports, and Index Chemicus. He is the founding editor and publisher of The Scientist, a news magazine for life scientists. In 2003, the University of South Florida School of Information was honored to have him as lecturer for the Alice G. Smith Lecture. In 2007, he launched HistCite, a bibliometric analysis and visualization software package.