Cameo of an Information Scientist: Eugene Garfield and Citation Indexing
Origin of the scientific journal
"...let us first examine the history of the vital process that made science assume a strongly cumulative character. The origin of this was in the seventeenth-century invention of the scientific journal and the device of the learned paper--one of the most distinct and fundamental innovations of the Scientific Revolution. The earliest surviving journal is the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, first published in 1665. It was followed rapidly by some three or four similar journals published by other national academies in Europe. Thereafter, as the need increased, so did the number of journals, reaching a total of about one hundred by the beginning of the nineteenth century, one thousand by the middle, and some ten thousand by 1900." Derek J. de Solla Price, Science Since Babylon
Links among articles in scientific journals
"I therefore propose and adopt the convention that if Paper R contains a bibliographic footnote using and describing Paper C, then R contains a reference to C, and C has a citation from R. The number of references a paper has is measured by the number of items in its bibliography as endnotes and footnotes, etc., while the number of citations a paper has is found by looking it up on some sort of citation index and seeing how many other papers mention it." Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science...and Beyond
The significance of links
"In a nutshell, citations symbolize the conceptual association of scientific ideas as recognized by publishing research authors. By the references they cite in their papers, authors make explicit linkages between their current research and prior work in the archive of scientific literature." Eugene Garfield, The Concept of Citation Indexing: A Unique and Innovative Tool for Navigating the Research Literature
Garfield's pioneering role
"Dr. Eugene Garfield, founder and now Chairman Emeritus of ISI® [Institute for Scientific Information], was deeply involved in the research relating to machine generated indexes in the mid-1950's and early 1960's. One of his earliest points of involvement was a project sponsored by the Armed Forces Medical Library (predecessor to our current National Library of Medicine). The Welch Medical Library Indexing project, as it was called, was to investigate the role of automation in the organization and retrieval of medical literature. The hope was that the problems associated with subjective human judgement in selection of descriptors and indexing terms could be eliminated. By removing the human element, one might thereby increase the speed with which information was incorporated in to the indexes. It might also increase the cost-effectiveness of the indexes. Garfield grasped early on that review articles in the journal literature were heavily reliant on the bibliographic citations that referred the reader to the original published source for the notable idea or concept. By capturing those citations, Garfield believed, the researcher could immediately get a view of the approach taken by another scientist to support an idea or methodology based on the sources that the published writer had consulted and cited as pertinent in the bibliography. As retrieval terms, citations could function as well as keywords and descriptors that were thoughtfully assigned by a professional indexer." History of Citation Indexing
An example
In 1998 I published "Orthography as a Fundamental Impediment to Online Information Retrieval" Journal of the American Society for Information Science, v.49(8), 1998, 731-741. In 2002, Proctor gave my paper a reference
Advantages of citation indexes
- Citation-based associations and connections within the literature are made by authors themselves
- Timeliness - human indexing is slower due to the time required to read or scan the papers and make subjective judgments about relevant descriptors
How does Google work? [Determining meaning mechanically]
"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B." PageRank Explained
How does Yahoo work? [Determining meaning by expert]
"The Yahoo! Directory is organized by subject. Most sites in it are suggested to us by users. Sites are placed in categories by Yahoo! editors, who visit and evaluate your suggestions and decide where the sites best belong. We do this to ensure that Yahoo! is organized in the best possible way, making the directory easy to use, intuitive, helpful, and fair to everyone." How to Suggest Your Site