Friday, December 01, 2006

Dr. Eugene Garfield (father of Scientometrics and Bibliometrics)Wins The Online Information Lifetime Achievement Award



Dr. Eugene Garfield Wins The Online Information Lifetime Achievement Award
"Thomson Scientific, part of The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC) and leading provider of information solutions to the worldwide research and business communities, today announced that Dr. Eugene Garfield is the 2006 recipient of the Online Information Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of more than 50 years of dedication, leadership and innovation in the information industry. The 2006 International Information Industry Awards were held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London, UK on Wednesday, November 29th.

Often dubbed the “Father of Scientometrics and Bibliometrics,” Dr. Garfield is founder & chairman emeritus of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI®)—now Thomson Scientific. Garfield’s career in scientific communication and information science began in 1951 when he joined the Welch Medical Indexing Project at Johns Hopkins University, USA. The project planted the seeds for several major advances in scientific communication and information science that have distinguished Dr. Garfield’s career.

In 1958, Garfield was contacted by Joshua Lederberg, who was interested in knowing what happened to the citation index Garfield proposed in 1955 in the journal, Science. This, eventually led to a meeting with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to produce and distribute a Genetics Citation Index, including a multi-disciplinary index to the science literature of 1961. Undaunted by the NIH and National Science Foundation’s (NSF) disinterest in publishing the latter index, Garfield began regularly publishing the Science Citation Index® (SCI®) in 1964 through the Institute for Scientific Information. The SCI® soon istinguished itself from other literature indexes and was recognized as a basic and fundamental innovation in scientific communication and information science.

From 1961 on, Garfield’s career is marked by the constant enhancement of existing resources combined with the extraordinary development of new information tools for researchers, including Current Contents®, plus citation indexes for the social sciences (SSCI®) and arts and humanities (A&HCI®).

During the past decades, as the volume of literature has been growing exponentially, Garfield’s innovations have made it possible for researchers to cope with and keep up with articles directly relevant to their interests. Current Contents has become a vital and basic component of clinical research and the research laboratory. "

interviews: http://acscinf.org/docs/publications/Interviews/Garfield/2006/


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