Eugene Garfield, founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and who launched the field of citation analysis, passed away on February 26, 2017. The Scientist brought us this sobering news in their release, “Scientometrics Pioneer Eugene Garfield Dies.”
Garfield made a lasting impact on scientific, medical and scholarly research. In addition to the ISI’s Science Citation Index, a system used to chart connections between pieces of scientific literature that later became accessible electronically via the Web of Science, Garfield launched Current Contents, an early effort that sought to compile important information on scientific literature. He founded The Scientist in 1986 as a news magazine for researchers.
Garfield’s contributions to the field of data analytics and scientometrics were matched by his humanity. “No matter how important he became, he always had time for everybody,” Meher Garfield, Eugene Garfield’s wife of more than a decade, told The Scientist. “He always thought of his employees as his extended family.”
Garfield is survived by his wife, Meher, three sons, a daughter, a step-daughter, two granddaughters, and two great-grandchildren.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
