The eureka moment
The breakthrough that changed indexing forever

Entrepreneurs are the engine of the world: the free thinkers with the spirit of the pioneers. Dr. Eugene Garfield is such a man: resourceful, inventive and, most importantly, hard-working.

Raised through the Great Depression by his Jewish mother and Italian stepfather, Dr Garfield learned the value of hard work. Though their income may have been modest, they had all the food and clothing they needed. This work ethic helped him fund his college days. While at Columbia University in New York, he hustled for fares in the same taxicab garage that Robert De Niro made famous in Taxi Driver.

The Welch Medical Library is where his career in scientific communication and information science began, but the reference from his previous employer didn’t indicate his potential: “Garfield is not particularly imaginative but a hard-working fellow”. Fortunately, hard work was just what the project needed.

William Adair, a retired Vice President of Shepard’s Citations, had read newspaper reports of the Welch Project and wrote to Dr. Garfield, wondering if his company’s legal citation system could be applied to science. “As a result of this letter, I went to a public library in Baltimore to look at Shepard’s Citations,” says Dr. Garfield. “When I saw it I exclaimed, ‘Eureka!’ because in my mind I had been looking for this kind of structure. I called him and said, ‘Mr Adair, I want to write an article about a citation index for
science, but I want to give you credit. I invite you to write a short article so that I can cite it.’”