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NEXT STORY

Discovering Shepard's Citations

RELATED STORIES

Getting a job with Smith, Kline & French
Eugene Garfield Scientist
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When I was at the Johns Hopkins, you know, project I had met all sorts of interesting people like John Mauchly. I met... Calvin Mooers came to visit me. I don’t know if you remember Ellen Tornudd was the Director of... the leading librarian in Scandinavia. She’s a real good friend. She’s retired now. So, Ted Herdegen, from Smith, Kline & French, had come down to the project, and he heard that I was in library school and they wanted to set up an IBM punch card system for one of their drugs. He calls me up, and tells me that they, they have an opening, you know, would you like to be... want to come down and work for 6 months to, to set up this system? And, at the time... by then I had... my best friend at the time was somebody I’d met by accident while on vacation in, in Canada, Casimir Borkowski, do you remember that name? Well, Casimir was a very interesting guy, but then the point being that he was working for Léon Dostert at the Georgetown machine translation project from Russian to English, and I was supposed to go to work with them at the project. So, Ted Herdegen called me up and says he’s got, wants to offer me this job as a consultant, and I said, but I’m already committed to go to... I’m going to go to... I’ve got this graduate post doc or whatever you call it... no, not a postdoc, a graduate teach... research assistant at the, the machine translation project. Now, a few days later I get a call from Casimir that the Government cut off their research money and the project was terminated. So, I got hold of Ted Herdegen and I, I was desperate for money by that time, I said, 'I, I’ll come to work for you', and that’s how I, I came to work for Smith Kline. I came down there. I graduated in June of ’54 and I... but while I was at library school was when I first wrote up the idea of the citation index. The paper that I eventually published in Science was written originally as a, as a term paper.

Eugene Garfield (1925-2017) was an American scientist and publisher. In 1960 Garfield set up the Institute for Scientific Information which produced, among many other things, the Science Citation Index and fulfilled his dream of a multidisciplinary citation index. The impact of this is incalculable: without Garfield’s pioneering work, the field of scientometrics would have a very different landscape, and the study of scholarly communication would be considerably poorer.

Listeners: Henry Small

Henry Small is currently serving part-time as a research scientist at Thomson Reuters. He was formerly the director of research services and chief scientist. He received a joint PhD in chemistry and the history of science from the University of Wisconsin. He began his career as a historian of science at the American Institute of Physics' Center for History and Philosophy of Physics where he served as interim director until joining ISI (now Thomson Reuters) in 1972. He has published over 100 papers and book chapters on topics in citation analysis and the mapping of science. Dr Small is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Honorary Fellow of the National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services, and past president of the International Society for Scientometrics and Infometrics. His current research interests include the use of co-citation contexts to understand the nature of inter-disciplinary versus intra-disciplinary science as revealed by science mapping.

Duration: 3 minutes, 16 seconds

Date story recorded: September 2007

Date story went live: 23 June 2009