Eugene "Gene" Garfield (born
September 16,
1925 in
New York City) is an
American scientist, one of the founders of
bibliometrics and
scientometrics. He received a PhD in Structural Linguistics from the
University of Pennsylvania in 1961. Dr. Garfield was the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which was located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ISI now forms a major part of the science division of Thomson-Reuters company. Garfield is responsible for many innovative bibliographic products, including
Current Contents, the
Science Citation Index (SCI), and other citation indexes, the
Journal Citation Reports, and
Index Chemicus. He is the founding editor and publisher of
The Scientist, a news magazine for life scientists. In 2007, he launched
HistCite, a bibliometric analysis and visualization software package.
Following ideas inspired by
Vannevar Bush's famous 1945 article "
As We May Think", Garfield undertook the development of a comprehensive
citation index showing the propagation of scientific thinking; he started the
Institute for Scientific Information in 1955. The creation of the
Science Citation Index made it possible to calculate
impact factors
, which measure the importance of scientific journals. It led to the unexpected discovery that a few journals like
Nature and
Science were core for all of
hard science. The same pattern does not happen with the humanities or the social sciences.