14 Facts About Eugene Garfield

Eugene Eli Garfield was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics.

Eugene Garfield helped to create Current Contents, Science Citation Index, Journal Citation Reports, and Index Chemicus, among others, and founded the magazine The Scientist.

Eugene Garfield's parents were second generation immigrants living in East Bronx in New York City.

Eugene Garfield studied at the University of Colorado and University of California, Berkeley before getting a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Columbia University in 1949.

Eugene Garfield went on to do his PhD in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, which he completed in 1961 for developing an algorithm for translating chemical nomenclature into chemical formulas.

In 1953, at the First Symposium on Machine Methods in Scientific Documentation, Eugene Garfield got introduced to Shepard's Citations.

In 1960, Eugene Garfield founded the Institute for Scientific Information, which was located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Eugene Garfield was responsible for many innovative bibliographic products, including Current Contents, the Science Citation Index, and other citation databases, the Journal Citation Reports, and Index Chemicus.

Eugene Garfield was the founding editor and publisher of The Scientist, a news magazine for life scientists.

Eugene Garfield's work led to the development of several information retrieval algorithms, like the HITS algorithm and PageRank.

Eugene Garfield was honored with the Award of Merit from the Association for Information Science and Technology in 1975.

Eugene Garfield was awarded the John Price Wetherill Medal in 1984, the Derek de Solla Price Memorial Medal in 1984, and the Miles Conrad Award in 1985.

Eugene Garfield was elected to the American Philosophical Society that same year.

Eugene Garfield is survived by a wife, three sons, a daughter, two granddaughters, and two great-grandchildren.