Essays of an Information Scientist

Essays documents 14 years of Garfield's insights and activities as he progressed from the concept of a unified index in science through its consummation in the biological, physical, and social sciences.

Abstract

Eugene Garfield will perhaps be remembered most for his development ofCurrent Contents and theScience Citation Index (SCI). The latter is based on the observations that, when articles are cited by other articles, they tend to be related by subject, and the number of times they are cited is a general indicator of the quality of the author's work. Thus, besides being an effective retrieval instrument, theSCIhas provided a new and powerful breakthrough for exploring and mapping the progression of science. Essaysdocuments 14 years of Garfield's insights and activities as he progressed from the concept of a unified index in science through its consummation in the biological, physical, and social sciences. There are few important issues in communication in the era of Big Science that he does not address. The essays are seminal ("Citation," "Indexing," "Historico-bibliography," and "The Sociology of Sciences"), whimsical ("If Secrecy Is