FROM THE HISTORY OF MEDICAL INFORMATICS

The Most Influential Scientist in the Development of Medical informatics (17): Eugene Garfield

Izet Masic EUGENE GARFIELD (1925–2017) Eugene Garfield (1925-2017) is an Faculty of medicine, University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina American scientist, one of the founders of and (1- Corresponding author: Prof Izet Masic, MD, PhD. 3). He received a PhD in Structural Faculty of medicine, University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. ORCID ID: http://orcid. Linguistics from the University of org/0000-0002-9080-5456, E-mail: [email protected]; Pennsylvania in 1961. Dr. Garfield was [email protected] the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), which was located in doi: 10.5455/aim.2017.25.145-145 , Pennsylvania. He founded ACTA INFORM MED. 2017 JUN; 25(2): 145-145 the ISI in 1960 and developed an Received: May 17, 2017 • Accepted: Jun 20, 2017 indexing system for literature, based on the analysis of citations used within a given work. Works earn an “,” a measure of citations to other science journals that serves as an indicator of their importance in the Institute for Scientific Information field. The more citations in reputable in 1955. The creation of the Science journals, the higher the impact factor. made it possible to The ISI sold subscriptions to their calculate impact factor, which measures publication the Science Citation the importance of scientific journals. It Index, and over time grew to include led to the unexpected discovery that a the Social Sciences Citation Index few journals like and Science (SSCI) and the Arts & Humanities were core for all of hard science. The Citation Index (A&HCI). These same pattern does not happen with databases now form the foundation the humanities or the social sciences. of the online research tool called the Garfield’s work led to the development Web of Knowledge. He is responsible of several for many innovative bibliographic , like HITS and Pagerank. products, including Current Contents, Both use the structured citation the (SCI), and between websites through hyper-links. other citation databases, the Journal Citation Reports, and Index Chemicus. REFERENCES He is the founding editor and publisher 1. Masic I, Mihalas G. (Eds.). et al. of The Scientist, a news magazine for Contributions to the History of Medical life scientists. In 2007, he launched informatics. Avicena. Sarajevo, 2014: HistCite, a bibliometric analysis 258-9. ISBN 978-9958-720-56-7. and visualization software package. 2. Masic I. History of Medical informatics: Following ideas inspired by Vannevar an overview. Avicena. Sarajevo, 2014: Bush’s famous 1945 article “As We 153-205. ISBN 978-9958-720-50-0. May Think”, Garfield undertook 3. Masic I. Biographical Lexicon of Medical the development of a comprehensive Informatics. Avicena. Sarajevo, 2015: citation index showing the propagation 163-4. ISBN 978-9958-720-57-4. of scientific thinking; he started the

FROM THE HISTORY OF MEDICAL INFORMATICS / ACTA INFORM MED. 2017 JUN; 25(2): 145-145 145