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The index with all the answers

Dr. Eugene Garfield, Chairman Emeritus of Thomson Scientific, explains how his incredible work in citation indexing changed scientific research and led to the ISI Web of Knowledge

It started in a converted chicken coop in Thorofare, NJ, with a loan from HFC Bank. Citation indexing certainly wasn’t a new concept (see the eureka moment), but applying it to the gargantuan fields of science, technology and engineering was; and it was from this chicken coop that Dr. Eugene Garfield would start the dizzying process of creating an index that covered the complete spectrum of human scientific knowledge.

Deep impact

The basic concept of citation indexing is simple: the value of information is determined by those who use it. The quality of a work can be determined by measuring the impact it has on the community at large. The more a particular article is cited, the more influential it has become.

After World War II, billions of government dollars were poured into research

and development, leading to a huge growth in the amount of published literature. The usual method, indexing by subject—specific indices, was a hugely labor—intensive process. There needed to be a better way to manage information.

Auto-piloting

Also, subject indexing, because it was so labor-intensive, suffered lag times between the publication of journals and the production of indices. This was frustrating to the research community. The answer would prove to be automation.

Before starting his own enterprise, Dr. Garfield had been a member of the Welch Medical Library Indexing Project. Sponsored by the Armed Forces Medical Library, this project investigated the role of automation in the organization and retrieval of medical literature.

Dr. Garfield realized early on that review articles in journal literature were heavily reliant on the bibliographic citations that referred the reader to the original published source. As retrieval terms, citations could function as well as manually indexed keywords and descriptors.

In the early 1960s, Dr. Garfield and his associates developed two pilot projects to test the viability and efficiency of a citation index: first, the creation of a database indexing the citations of 5,000 chemical patents; second, with the recently incorporated Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), he started the Genetics Citation Index on behalf of the United States National Institutes of Health.

The government chose not to subsidize the development of a national citation database after this. But Dr. Garfield was encouraged by the project’s success and privately published the first multidisciplinary citation index, the Science Citation Index (SCI).

Enter the Web

“A major characteristic of the Science Citation Index was its multidisciplinary character,” says Dr. Garfield. “Particularly because the fields of genetics and molecular biology - starting with the work of Watson and Crick, which was based on crystallography data and biological chemistry - were overlapping. “Traditional genetics was undergoing vast changes. The Genetics Citation Index project made interdisciplinary coverage essential.”