Talk:Eugene Garfield

Making the implicit explicit

The sample text in trouble

Following ideas inspired by Vannevar Bush's famous 1945 article As We May Think, Garfield undertook the development of a comprehensive citation index showing the propagation of scientific thinking, he started the Institute for Scientific Information in 1955. The creation of the Science Citation Index (SCI) . . .

Citation analysis using Google searches

• "Results 1 - 10 of about 330 for Eugene Garfield, memex, Vannevar Bush"
• "Results 1 - 10 of about 3,290 for Eugene Garfield, world brain, H. G. Wells"

The search results suggest that the influence of Bush (1945) on Garfield, if any, is likely to be one tenth of that of Wells (1938). This assumes that Bush was not influenced by Wells at all, who spoke too loud for Bush in his capacity not to hear him.

Eugene Garfield (1975)

"The World Brain as seen by an Information Entrepreneur"

In: Manfred Kochen (ed.) Information for Action: from Knowledge to Wisdom, pp. 155-176. Academic Press, New York, 1975.

• See also: Eugene Garfield (1976) "The World Brain as Seen by an Information Entrepreneur" (Comment on Garfield (1975)) in: Essays of an Information Scientist by Eugene Garfield, vol 2 (1974-1976) (Philadelphia PA: ISI Press, 1977) pp. 638-639 (reprinted from Current Contents no. 48, Nov 29, 1976)

He also mentioned the World Brain (1938) a decade ago presumably aiming for the promotion of the newborn "Networks of Scientific Papers" called Science Citation Index. So his success may have owed Wells more or less. He was also acquainted with communist J. D. Bernal, the leading British wartime scientist (comparable with Bush) and the seminal author of The Social Function of Science (1939) that took the World Brain seriously. "Mechanization and the Record" was the original 1939 version (unpublished) of "As We May Think." In a sense, Wells and Bernal, not to mention Bush, were men of war.

Boyd Rayward (1975)

The Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organisation

FID520, VINITI, Moscow (txt)

• In 1937 the Institute for Intellectual Co-operation organised a World Congress for Universal Documentation in Paris. This was an enormous congress attended by representatives of governments as well as by those interested in documentation in a more private capacity. It was, in fact, the first time that such a large, influential congress had been held in the field since the IIB conferences of 1908 and 1910 and those of the UIA in 1910 and 1913. Here Otlet and La Fontaine came into much respectful praise. Their positions as grand old men of European documentation were clearly acknowledged. The idea of a Universal Network or System for Documentation was taken up and the IID once more changed its name and statutes to become the International Federation for Documentation, in order better to promote this. Here there was much talk of H. G. Wells' idea of a World Brain, a new form of the encyclopedia, an idea which, in a different form, Otlet had been writing about for decades. Here Otlet met Wells and made "magnificent improvisations". (p. 356)
• It is indeed paradoxical that libraries and archival repositories preserve large masses of documents without having the resources to catalog, analyse and circulate them [...]. The Universal Network of Documentation is called on to organise the liason of these reservoirs and repertories, of producers and users. The ultimate goal is to realise the World Encyclopedia according to the needs of the twentieth century. (p. 357) (my emphasis)

For the librarian glory, Rayward may wish Otlet could be known as the precursor to the World Wide Web instead of Wells who spoke as ill of the librarian practice as Bush. He gradually has found fault with Wells unnecessarily far beyond the idea of World Brain per se.

--KYPark (talk) 04:15, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Towards the World Brain [1]

• ``In a recent article published in Science, I used the idea of the World Brain as literary device to place the Science Citation Index in proper historical perspective.``

The Origins of the Eugene Garfield Economic Impact of Medical and Health Research Award [2]

• ``[T]he SCI® was invented primarily to improve traditional information retrieval methods. It was inspired by H. G. Wells' book World Brain, an encyclopedic database of all human knowledge. Once it was established, the inherent hyperlinked structure of the SCI led inevitably to its use for measuring the relative impacts of researchers, journals, institutions, and countries using publication and citation outputs as indicators.``

From theWorld Brain to the Informatorium [3]

• ``As most of you know, H.G. Wells' World Brain [3] has become a metaphor for a futuristic view of information science and technology. Others prefer to credit Vannevar Bush's Memex [4]. However, I have always given H.G. Wells the priority and even commissioned a major and unusual work of art in 1981 by Gabriel Liebermann with technical assistance from Vernon Porter at Texas Instruments. Their holographic etching entitled "The World Brain" resides in the lobby at ISI [5] in Philadelphia. Wells was also on my mind when I wrote "Towards the World Brain" [6], which includes my testimony before a Congressional Subcommittee on Education and Labor of the US House of Representatives of the 88th (1963--64) Congress.``

J.D. Bernal -- The Sage of Cambridge

4S Award Memorializes His Contributions to the Social Studies of Science.

Current Contents, No. 19, p.5-17, May 10, 1982. pdf

Appendix: J. D. Bernal. "Review of the Science Citation Index, Science Progress, 53(211) 455-9, 1965.

• ``It was a desire to publicly recognize his help that compelled me to honor Bernal in my own small way in 1975. In that year I dedicated the first published largescale statistical analysis of journals, the SCI Journal Citation Report, to Bernal.``

• ``In fact, he was way ahead of his time. The final paragraphs from his book The Social Function of Science illustrate the particular genius of Bernal well, and I am pleased to be able to quote them here:

  In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements. Each one knows that his work depends on that of his predecessors and colleagues, and that it can only reach its fruition through the work of his successors. In science men collaborate not because they are forced to by superior authority or because they blindly follow some chosen leader, but because they realize that only in this willing collaboration can each man find his goal, Not orders, but advice, determines action. Each man knows that only by advice, honestly and disinterestedly given, can his work succeed, because such advice expresses as near as may be the inexorable logic of the material world, stubborn fact. Facts cannot be forced to our desires, and freedom comes by admitting this necessity and not by pretending to ignore it.

  These are things that have been learned painfully and incompletely in the pursuit of science. Only in the wider tasks of humanity will their use be found.`` (p. 415-6)

--KYPark (talk) 13:49, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

• Garfield might have deliberately omitted the following context on top of the above excerpt from Bernal:

  ``Science as Communism. -- Already we have in the practice of science the prototype for all human common action. The task which the scientists have undertaken -- the understanding and control of nature and of man himself -- is merely the conscious expression of the task of human society. The methods by which this task is attempted, however imperfectly they are realized, are the methods by which humanity is most likely to secure its own future. In its endeavour, science is communism.`` (my emphasis to show up the author's Marxist ideology, though perhaps to the capitalist agony)

--KYPark (talk) 14:38, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Added Criticism Section

I felt the tone of this article was a tad hagiographic, there being even a description of Garfield with the name "Gene." (A Freudian slip by an insider? Let's hope we're all being honest here.) This subject is not uncontroversial for the same reason that the use of big data and algorithms to assess citizens in various ways is not uncontroversial. Their use to assess academic performance and the quality of science also involves many of the dangers described in books such as Cathy O'Niel's Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy." I hope some others with detailed knowledge in this field expand this criticism section so this article may at least be somewhat more balanced. Gunnermanz (talk) 12:23, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

External links

Please consider adding this link to an in-depth video of Eugene Garfield telling his life story. The video is freely available on the Web of Stories website (http://webofstories.com)

• Eugene Garfield video at Web of Stories

Fitzrovia calling (talk) 13:02, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

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"not to to remake them"

"Garfield indexed all previously synthesized compounds so that not to remake them". Uh? Errantios (talk) 02:35, 26 January 2023 (UTC)