Commentary: The ‘bibliographic impact factor’ and the still uncharted sociology of epidemiology

Abstract

It is 1955, a time of ‘mechanical devices’ and ‘punched cards’,1 before microcomputers, of course, before the ‘impact factor’. 1955: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are born (Box 1). It is only 50 years ago: Eugene Garfield first proposes a bibliographic ‘indexing’ or ‘citation’ system for scientific literature.1 His paper advocates a new citation index—as opposed to traditional subject indexing—based on a clever and innovative concept—today not much en vogue—: the association-of-ideas. An association-of-ideas index. Of course, ‘nothing could substitute for extensive reading, but . . . ’ (page 31). The core of his starting point is not that new (centuries old, actually): the ideas expressed by authors in articles (‘the micro unit of thought’, page 11) can be found and followed-up in the citations to those articles. Every time an author cites a previous article (i.e. the ideas within the article), he or she is indexing it from his/her experience. This emphasis on the ideas, uhm . . .

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Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.