The Web of Knowledge. A Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Garfield

Citation

Line, M.B. (2001), "The Web of Knowledge. A Festschrift in Honor of Eugene Garfield", The Electronic Library, Vol. 19 No. 4, pp. 261-265. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2001.19.4.261.2

It is hard to think of anyone who merits a Festschrift more than Eugene Garfield, “the undisputed patriarch of citation indexing”, to quote the editors. This substantial volume of 26 papers with an introduction does him proud. It is not only a tribute to Gene but a valuable collection of essays on issues relating to his ground‐breaking work. Of the 37 authors, just over half are from the USA, the rest coming from Denmark, Hungary, India, Mexico, The Netherlands, Spain and the UK. Nearly all are familiar: they include such names as Robert Hayes, Joshua Lederberg, Jack Meadows and Robert Merton.

It is rather invidious to make a selection of papers, since there seem to be no weak ones, but some I found especially interesting are Lederberg’s paper, which contains Garfield’s seminal 1955 article in Science and correspondence between Garfield and Lederberg leading up to the establishment of the Science Citation Index; Stephen Cole on “The role of journals in the growth of scientific knowledge”; Vinkler on his Relative Publication Growth indicator; “Visualizing citation connections” by Cawkell; the paper by Braun and others on the balance of SCI’s coverage (better than has been suggested); van Raan on the use of advanced measures to assess scientific excellence; “The complementarity of scientometrics and economics” by Diamond; Small’s “Charting pathways through science: exploring Garfield’s vision of a unified index to science”; and White’s “Toward ego‐centered citation analysis”.

The above papers are just a personal sample. To give a fuller picture of the volume’s range, I might mention the biographical sketch of Garfield by Thackray and Brock, and papers on scientific collaboration between India and China (Arunachalam), on the growth of journal literature (Meadows – which does not, however, mention that the growth of papers does not necessarily equate with that of journals), on publication indicators in Latin America (Russell), on scientometrics and firm (= company) performance (Koenig and Westermann‐Cicio), on patent citations (Oppenheim), on the Garfield input into the sociology of science (Merton), and on graphing micro‐regions in the web of knowledge (Hargens).

The editors suggest that Garfield’s lasting legacy will not be the citation indexes themselves, massively important though they are, but “the interdisciplinary research community, denoted by the portmanteau label ‘scientometrics”’. Garfield may not have founded a new discipline, but he has been a key figure in its growth and development. The papers here exemplify the influence he has had. Although they contain little that is original, many of them are useful reviews of the current state of knowledge, the more useful for being together between two covers. This should ensure that this volume avoids the fate of most Festschriften, of being left on the shelf as a worthy monument rather than a book to be read. The editors have done a splendid job,