The impact of Eugene Garfield through the prism of Web of Science

Abstract

The paper attempts to quantify the impact of the scholarly publishing activity of Dr. Eugene Garfield, the founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Institute for Scientific Information, the father of citation indexing of academic literature. In the project the most current version of the Web of Science system was used with five of its component databases. It provides the most comprehensive, but still not complete, set of cited reference enhanced bibliographic records for Garfield's journal articles, conference papers, reviews, essays, commentaries, letters to the editors, and for the 6,500 citations that his publications received, and could be credited to a matching record in the master file of Web of Science. The paper also analyzes the effect of the fact that his books, book chapters, technical reports are not considered in calculating the impact measures reported by the informative Citation Report module of Web of Science, and the consequences of the approximately 7,000 and references received by all his works that would more than double Garfield's traditionally measured impact factor, the average rate of citations per publication, for his entire ouvre. There is a short discussion about improvements that should be made in the citation matching algorithm that -in his case- distorts the distribution of citations among his more than 1,000 essays and commentaries in Current Contents, Current Comments and The Scientist for reason of an exceptional bibliographic and chronological-numerical designation pattern. Suggestions are made to make the browsing, searching, sorting, and processing of the reference entries and cited reference counts in the separate index file of cited references of Web of Science, which in his case amount to a combination of more than 13,300 matching, orphan and stray references in the more than 3,300 reference entries to his publications that were cited at least once.

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No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

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